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THE 

Philosophy of Individuality 



or 



THE ONE AND THE MANY 



BY 
ANTOINETTE BROWN BLACKWELL 

AUTHOR OF "STUDIES IN GENERAL SCIENCE" " THE SEXES THROUGHOUT NATURE 
"THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY," ETC. 



7 



Wi*? 



y 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK LONDON 

27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND 

&|j* Jl nicker bocker |)rm 
1893 






**' 



THE LIBRARY 

OF CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON 



Copyright, 1893 

BY 

ANTOINETTE BROWN BLACKWELL 



Etectrotyped, Printed, and Bound by 

Ubc Tftntcfcerbocher Press, Hew lt?orfe 
G. P. Putnam's Sons 






PREFACE. 



In every book there is both the topic under considera- 
tion and the method of its treatment. The present work, 
being a theory of the inherent correlations of all processes, 
attempts to give correlative explanations also. 

Nature's proceedings are held to be rhythmic in char- 
acter, physical changes tending to return upon themselves 
and unprogressively to repeat their inherent cycles of 
changes, except when psychical gains, which wind up- 
wards in continuous spirals, carry up the physical with 
them, as in all normal organization and its processes. In 
dealing with the complexity and multiplicity of natural 
phenomena, the writer has tried to follow the lead of 
the theory in the assumed explanations — repeatedly 
returning to the same themes and presenting their 
various aspects. 

This method may have many advantages, but admit- 
tedly it has the serious disadvantage of treating no one 
branch of the subject either consecutively or exhaustively, 
since every point is brought forward rather in the light 
of its co-ordinations than that of its intrinsic character 
and importance. Thus no subject assumes to be ade- 
quately discussed in all of its aspects, or to be presented 
otherwise than as specially illustrating and confirming the 
central theory of a correlated persistent individuality in 



IV PREFACE. 

each of the ultimate units of Conditioned Being. These 
individuals are supposed to be innately conditioned in 
working correlation, and to obtain their mental evolu- 
tion through mutual aid from inherently adapted co- 
operations. The method of the discussion leads to 
partial repetitions, which are increased by the desire to 
keep each section of the subject measurably distinct and 
complete in itself. 

As to the underlying principle of persistent individ- 
uality, there seems to be no room for misgiving. In the 
preface of The Physical Basis of Immortality \ published 
in 1876, were these words: " Men may yet reasonably 
hope to find a more comprehensive rendering of the scheme 
through which definite units of being, physical and psych- 
ical, may persist as units, and yet be able to co-operate 
endlessly in a system of universal changes." The theory 
of persistent mind-matter individuals was nearly as distinct 
and quite as fully accepted by me then as now. Taken 
as an admitted premise, Immortality for all conditioned 
being was the only logical conclusion. 

But it was not then sufficiently apparent that this con- 
ception of the ultimate atoms could consistently explain 
and harmonize mental and material phenomena, and by 
co-ordinated interpretations of the most diverse processes 
simplify and unify Nature and her manifestations. This 
assumption may not now be fully conceded. Then we 
can do no more than appeal again to each and every class 
of phenomena to justify the theory or otherwise to dis- 
credit it conclusively. 

The motion-feeling individualities afford a consistent 
explanation of the possible emergence of the Relative 
from the Absolute by the intervention of Beneficent 
and Rational Causation. They would be sufficient evi- 
dence that the All of Being must be Intelligent Living 
Power which everywhere " makes for righteousness " by 
sustaining the ultimate beings, so conditioned that they 



PREFACE. V 

are impelled to increase in knowledge and to desire a 
higher excellence both for themselves and for others. 

Have we demonstrated a conscious immortality ? Yes ; 
if our leading premises are accepted. Yes ; if the conver- 
gence and accumulation of testimony are of more value 
than pure logical deductions. 




CONTENTS. 



i. Introductory i 

2. The Scope and Character of the Inquiry . 26 

3. What is Motion ? 36 

4. The Rhythmic Atom . . . . . '. 56 

5. Matter a Complex of Modes of Motion . 77 

6. Light, Heat, and Sound and their Transfer- 

ence 115 

7. Electricity and Magnetism .... 145 

8. Radiation and Gravitation . . . 179 

9. Summing Up 200 

10. Correlated Mind and Matter .... 244 

n. Organic Life and Mind 270 

12. Organization on its Physical Side . . . 292 

13. The Nascent Mind and its Environment . 315 

14. Correlated Theory 341 

15. Conscious Mind and Co-operative Organism . 356 

16. The Evolution of Mind 387 

17. The Mind and its Co-operant .... 420 

18. In Consciousness and Out of Consciousness . 451 

19. The One and the Many 479 

Index 513 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



PAGE 



Fig. i — Rhythmic atom midway in vibratory elonga- 
tions and retraction ..... 50 

Fig. 2 — Rhythmic atom half-way in direct phases . 63 

Fig. 3 — Rhythmic atom half-way in reverse phases . 64 

Fig. 4 — Rhythmic atom. Horizontal vibrations two- 
thirds elongated ; perpendiculars two-thirds 
retracted ....... 65 

Fig. 5 — Rhythmic atom. Horizontal vibrations elon- 
gated ; perpendiculars retracted . . 66 

Fig. 6 — Rhythmic atom, with curved vibrations mid- 
way in direct phases 67 

Fig. 7 — Rhythmic atom, with curved vibrations. One 

group elongated, the other retracted . . 68 

Fig. 8 — Two-atom molecule united by complementary 

vibrations ....... 85 

Fig. 9 — Two-atom molecule united by complementary 

vibrations ....... 86 

Fig. 10 — Two atoms in position to unite by homologous 

vibrations .87 

Fig. 11 — Two-atom molecule united by homologous 

vibrations . 90 

Fig. 12 — Three atoms in position to form a chemical 

molecule \ . . . . .91 



X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Fig. 13 — Three-atom molecule united by homologous 

vibrations ....... 94 

Fig. 14 — Three-atom molecule united by homologous 

vibrations 95 

Fig. 15 — Five atoms in position to form a chemical 

molecule ....... 98 

Fig. 16 — Five-atom molecule united by four A and four 

B vibrations 99 

Fig. 17 — Atom in magnetic stress 152 

Fig. 18 — Atom in electrical stress 153 

Fig. 19 — Vibrations before surface contact . . 159 

Fig. 20 — Vibrations at moment of surface contact . . 159 

Fig. 21 — Same vibrations electrified and connected with 

the circuit 159 




THE 

PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY 

OR 

THE ONE AND THE MANY 



INTRODUCTORY. 

TRUTH like daylight is presented to every eye ; but all 
truth is not like daylight — so obtrusive that every open eye 
is flooded with it unsought. The daylight shows us visible 
bodies ; but truth is hidden largely within the visible, and 
whoever would find much of it must penetrate a long 
way beneath the surface of things. 

The distinct simple explanations of the past, so obvious 
and reasonable that they compelled an early acceptance, 
have generally proved to be no more than partial truths 
often heavily veiled with illusions. As facts accumulated, 
the apparently self-evident hypothesis became much too 
scanty to cover all of them satisfactorily. It proved to be 
not only too narrow and too short, but too rigid in its 
unqualified simplicity ; a progressive broadening, modify- 
ing and eliminating, was compelled on all sides. This is 
claimed to be the true cognitive method. 

No primitive man could have dreamed that color was 
not wholly an objective fact. The green leaf, the red 
apple, the golden orange, in color and form, were entirely 



2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

independent of himself. Now, science teaches us that the 
sensation of color must be subjective ; and as form is by 
no means as simply solid as it appears to our perceptions, 
that the mind must in some way do its own share of the 
work in enabling us to see both the solid form and the 
vivid color. Heat and light, long felt to be undoubtedly 
forms of subtle matter, are found to belong to a kindred 
type of inconceivably rapid successive infinitesimal waves 
of motion. Scores of similar examples could be given in 
which theory, hastily adopted from first appearances, has 
been progressively modified. New facts not only accumu- 
late, but they are found to reach onward in such unexpected 
directions that explanation is compelled to grow also in 
order to explain. 

Moreover, in all growth there is not merely addition of 
the new ; there is at the same time an enforced sloughing 
off of the old. Theory can no more perfect itself without 
this double process than the embryo can become the per- 
fect organism without both accumulation and rejection of 
the material with which it deals. 

Maturer explanation, like the growing physical organism, 
tends to become more complex than the original from 
which it sprang. One apparently adequate cause very 
probably becomes merged in an entire group of co-opera- 
tive causes, each producing its own portion of the common 
effect. The simple theory becomes a complex cluster of 
theories. Its parts become better defined, and the division 
of explanatory diverse phases becomes much more com- 
plete and distinct though increasingly remarkable in 
adaptations each to each. 

Nature's differenced processes are found to be sharply 
and well defined. Heat is heat distinctively ; it is never 
identical with light. Electricity differs from both, yet is pro- 
gressively manifesting itself as more and more akin to both. 
Magnetism, closely allied to electricity, yet is not electricity. 
Then there are determinate grades of heat, of light, of 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. 3 

electricity, of magnetism, and of all other modes of energy. 
Explanation broadens in correspondence. 

With this growing diversity of theory, there is also a 
growing belief in a broadly underlying unity. The facts 
of Nature evidently must all be brought together in one 
comprehensive and co-operative interpretation. Science 
is increasingly confident that the higher simplicity but 
awaits discovery, which must be near at hand. 

A theory is nothing more nor less than the best expla- 
nation of data known to the special theorist — which he 
tries to harmonize and to account for from his own point 
of view. The explanations of the but semi-historic savage, 
of the average man of to-day, and of the highest scientific 
authorities differ only as to the accuracy and the compre- 
hensiveness of their respective knowledge of the subjects 
explained, and their several abilities in relating fact to fact 
in a consistent, inclusive whole. 

Complex explanations may be as lucid, adequate, and 
satisfactory in their wider, more complicated domain as 
the simpler ones in their narrower range. Both aim at 
rational and probable interpretations of things. Whenever 
and however a theory seems fully to explain the facts, it 
must, in the absence of any other equally or more satis- 
factory, be accepted provisionally by every mind which is 
able and willing to accept the point of view of the theorist 
and to comprehend the force of his reasoning. One accepts 
an apparent subjective truth as certainly as he accepts an 
apparent objective truth. Most minds believe in both 
alike. 

Nature's data being eminently complex and interde- 
pendent, it becomes probable that no explanation which 
covers a comprehensive group of resemblances with 
differences can be entirely simple in its character. The 
interdependence of its parts may strengthen the unity of 
the whole ; may internally relate it into an indissoluble 
oneness — in much the same way that the multiplicity of 



4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Nature's processes are yet evidently correlated in one 
universe. Every step forward leads onward to the next, 
as the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis in orderly 
succession. Theory, habitually enlarges rather than con- 
tracts ; yet, like organic growth, it proceeds by simultaneous 
assimilation and expurgation. 

Generalization harmonizes many heterogeneous details; 
but the dissimilarities are still there and in active exercise, 
each of its own peculiar modes, although included in one 
all-comprehending category. The generalization is one, 
but the countless differentiated processes may remain to be 
themselves explained. Classification can only classify the 
similarities ; it is concerned with a kind of knowledge, 
deep and penetrating, but, as usually made available, is 
simply abstracted from the thousand accompanying miscel- 
laneous possible cognitions. The more general a classifica- 
tion of this sort, the more exclusive must it become of 
everything special or distinctive. A vertebrate may be a 
mouse or a man ; the classification gives us one grand 
characterization of both, but it is not inclusive of the 
distinguishing characters of either. Knowledge of these 
cannot be gained from classification. 

The great desideratum is to find a principle which is 
inclusive of every detail of every process ; of quite every 
phase of all phenomena. If there be such a principle, 
peculiarities, finding their place here, would in no sense 
impair the unity of the whole, but would accentuate it 
rather; as the individuality of a man is more pronounced 
than that of a horse or a fox. These unclassified traits 
need explanation. 

The superficial view of an object is not essentially false ; 
it is only imperfect ; it reveals so much of reality, but not 
the whole of it. To find that, one must look deeper, to 
say nothing of going farther afield to discover its relation- 
ships. Solidity, recognized by the hand, is not manifest 
to the eye, and solidity affirmed to sensation by touch is 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. 5 

not entirely justified to the mind which has gained a dis- 
criminating knowledge of material structure ; yet neither 
sight nor touch are false ; they are both imperfect, and not 
fine enough to discern all of the structural mysteries of 
complex organization. 

The apparent is never the false, though the inferences 
drawn from it may be widely astray, as judged by ampler 
knowledge. Inference, hampered by limitation, may be 
legitimate from its own premises ; if so, it is some part 
of the larger truth and may become a stepping-stone in 
the right direction. Applied logic, like applied vision, or 
touch, or investigation in any other form, is but one means 
of testing reality. Theory and fact move hand in hand. 
In the acquirement of knowledge neither is without the 
other, since each must be tested and confirmed or rejected 
by its associate. The something known and the something 
which knows are held to be strictly co-operative and (prop- 
erly interpreted) to be but the two aspects of one process. 
Relation is not always between things like in kind, and 
relation itself may belong to unlike, not convertible, but 
inseparable functions of the same activity. 

It is a standing criticism of ancient philosophers that 
they theorized upon a much too slender foundation of 
observed facts. This still is, and indefinitely must con- 
tinue to be, a universal failing — if the criticism is just. 
But inadequate philosophy is much better than none at 
all ; science and philosophy, data and explanation, must 
progress together as they always have done in the past. 

It is eminently unprofitable to the individual to accumu- 
late lumbering masses of indeterminate facts, at sixes and 
sevens with each other and with the classified data of 
science ; but the accurate observers are the conservative 
steam-tugs, hovering about the ports and towing more 
adventurous vessels into safe harbor. Division of labor is 
desirable. Nevertheless, no mind ever succeeded in good 
constructive work without a series of hypotheses as a 



6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

framework into which accumulating data, whether collected 
by one's self or selected from the general storehouse, could 
be successfully placed in orderly relationships. Ancient 
theorists, like the modern, were only struggling bravely to 
explain the facts, principles, and relations underlying their 
every-day observations. 

Herbert Spencer analyzes consciousness into successive 
small sensitive shocks and the relations which arise between 
these primitive elements. The shocks are called " vivid 
impressions " ; but the relations between them, " faint im- 
pressions." Students of pure objective science seem dis- 
posed to make a similar classification in their department. 
Physical data — Nature's facts — they regard as tangible, 
actual, verifiable — the real elements of knowledge ; but 
explanations of the relations between these reals they 
class as metaphysics, philosophy, " faint impressions," 
supposed to be more or less misleading, wasteful as a 
use of energies which might be much better employed, 
and in any case no better than unprovable vagaries. 
At one time the " mere theorizer " was at an immense 
discount. 

But an enlargement of the comprehensive field of 
accepted knowledge has always been in process, and this 
has meant frequent radical revision, sometimes from the 
foundations upwards — though less of the observed data 
than of their interpretations. Scientific truth has been 
advanced hitherto about equally by the discovery of facts 
and by the discovery and announcement of the relations 
which are ^hown to relate the facts into a comprehensible 
whole. It has been found that the bare details of tangible 
things could only straggle in like homeless wanderers to a 
cold house if there were no life-giving theory present to 
bid them welcome and to establish their fraternity. The 
unrelated detail could neither recognize itself nor its 
kindred. It must remain helpless and idiotic unless 
warmed into life by some process of co-operation. 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. 7 

Explanation has proved to be the soul of all science, 
though its soul and body are inseparable. Theories are 
the mind's attempts at comprehending the nature, the 
processes, the properties both of things and of their 
relations. If not subsequently tested critically by experi- 
mentation of every available kind, doubtless it is of little 
value to assured knowledge. There is no other method 
than that of appeal to facts, and the endeavor to 
penetrate to their inmost character and to that of their 
many relationships. 

But is it certain that the things do radically differ from 
the relations between things f The objects which we know 
are themselves relatives. May they not themselves be 
the conditioned products of exactly correlated, equivalent, 
and co-operative energies, so equilibrated or static in their 
results that they produce upon our perceptions the impres- 
sion of permanent substances, as distinguished from active 
associated energies whose activities are apparent ? 

Then is our cognition, either of things or of their rela- 
tions, any more wholly subjective than the object is wholly 
objective ? Is not perception and the knowledge which it 
gains a real outlook of the mind into the real nature of the 
object, gained also through active correlation between the 
two ? What is the nature of correlative terms ? An ideal 
relation is not seen, nor is it manifested by its direct action 
upon any sense ; yet the relationship between, say, parent- 
hood and childhood is as real and is as really objective in 
its highest non-material sense as a permanent and actual 
fact as any material object can be. 

All knowledge of non-material or thought properties, 
concerning what we may appropriately call the nature of 
things, must be gained through mind-active, distinguished 
from mind-passive or receptive, as it is primarily in simple 
sensation. The mind acquires the one class of knowledge 
through insight, aided by mental comparison, inference, 
reasoning, and objective verification ; it acquires the other 



8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

from direct sense-testimony and like verification. One 
apple is larger or smaller than another ; is sweeter or 
sourer than another ; is rounder or less round than another. 
Through our eyes we see the large apple and the small 
apple ; but the sensation of seeing can never teach us the 
nature of difference between large and less large. The 
sensation produced in us by form and color is a living 
experience and a primitive knowledge ; but the resulting 
subsequent knowledge about form, color, and extension is 
a more discriminating mental process. Through taste we 
get the sensations sweet and sour, but sweetness discrimi- 
nated from sourness is not tasted but thought, and this 
wholly rational conception must come to us subsequent to 
the sensations. Given active intelligence and its laws, 
rational thought (organically assisted) everywhere medi- 
ates between simple sensations and transmutes them into 
subsequent ideas. 

Knowledge of the non-material relations of material 
things is not gained except through knowledge of the 
material things which are conditioned by their non-ma- 
terial relationships. In other words, the knowing mind 
and the objects known are alike constituted in accord 
with rational bonds corresponding each to the other. 
Between them there is harmony of quantities and quali- 
ties which are strictly correlative. It is the province of the 
mind to discover and analyze these ; to verify the reality 
and the exact correlativity of every known coexistence or 
sequence. It is our province in this treatise to attempt 
to show how and why this can be done. It is confidently 
maintained that the' relations between mind and matter 
are not unthinkable ; but both relatives and correlations 
are unlike in kind. 

Matter works extensively, mind intensively ; the one is 
the manifestation of the real, the other of the ideal ; they 
work in true but special correlation, and together they 
constitute the broader correlated reality of total condi- 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. 9 

tional being. This more comprehensive reality — including 
both the material and the mental aspects of associated 
process — we have no term adequate to express. Matter 
and Mind are both forces, genetically differenced in kind, 
but each taking its share in all co-operative work. Ge- 
ometry, so interpreted, is not exclusively the science of 
pure space. It is rather the science of ideal forms, of 
figure with definitely related but differenced functions ; its 
first elements probably derived through the observation of 
real extensions duly related in thought. 

Ideal relationships, functions, principles — all non-ma- 
terial facts, — are ideal existences in the external as in the 
internal universe ; they are not created by the related 
mind ; they are discovered through direct and indirect 
perception to be the actual laws and processes of 
the extensive universe ; to be the regulated modes or 
methods of physical co-operation. The mind relates them 
abstractly in thought, tests them by their own innate con- 
sistency, draws its inferences from them — aided at every 
step by its co-operative brain mechanism, — and resubmits 
them to the outside world for its verification or revision. 
The absurdest fancies are possible as ideas. 

It would be more reasonable for a self-confident natural- 
ist who had never left his own county or his own state 
to dogmatize from his personal observation as to the flora, 
fauna, physical geography, and geology of the rest of the 
world, than for any thinker, after gaining a knowledge of 
few or many unquestioned truths, to attempt to build up 
real science or real philosophy by thought and reflection 
only. He is sure to run wildly offthe track of real things, 
and once headed wrong, the more logical he is, the wider 
his divergence from the complexity of related orderly truth. 

We do well to remember that data generally, whether 
sense acquired or insight acquired, are presumably imper- 
fect and inadequate. We who see the sun rise, who feel 
the impenetrable solidity of transparent glass, who taste 



IO THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

sweetness, as in the apple, who stand immersed in the beau- 
tiful world of the apparent, which we know is not real, as 
it appears, except to feeling, — we do well to remember that 
non-material relations, even the most obvious, taken objec- 
tively, are but parts of an infinite network of correlations 
which lie immeasurably outside of our direct cognizance 
— that our knowledge must be a growth. 

Nature's elements, material and immaterial, and all of 
her relationships being in part or in effect within the 
object known and equally within the knowing mind, hence 
all subjective relationing — after our best endeavors — must 
be immensely imperfect ; and our truly necessary con- 
clusions may be far from adequately fundamental. We 
must accept the existing order of things. 

But in the midst of the greatest complexity there has 
always been found to emerge a wonderful underlying 
unity of essential orderly method ; and this unity of 
method is the clue in threading every labyrinth of diver- 
sities. The wider the range of inquiry, the more mutually 
corroborative the cumulative testimony, but the more im- 
perative the need of persistent objective verification. 

A working hypothesis can be justified by its agreement 
with comprehensive reality as assuredly as can the alleged 
physical facts upon which the hypothesis is based. It 
may more and more firmly ground itself upon an ever 
widening and increasing body of data — acquired largely 
perhaps by the lead and guidance which the theory itself 
is able to give. This body of data, tried, and rejected or 
accepted by the hypothetical standard, is capable in turn 
of helping to revise, to condemn, or to establish the theory. 
The interaction of empirical physical tests to which the 
mind submits its conjectures, is but one phase of the co- 
operation of the physical and the psychical. They work 
together whenever, wherever, and however mind begins to 
act as an efficient factor in the processes which include 
both the mental and the material. 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. 1 1 

Thus philosophy sometimes anticipates the strictly 
scientific data ; and science perhaps as often compels a 
modification of philosophy. But as there can be no 
science without a philosophy, and no true philosophy not 
grounded upon a true science, the two are but the unlike 
aspects, the differentiated but co-operative phases or 
modes, of the same reality. 

In like manner consistency teaches us that mind and 
matter themselves are but related, differentiated aspects 
of one conditioned reality ; and that the individual unit 
of conditioned being is a mind-matter unity — created an 
individual by virtue of its innate correlations. The physi- 
cal and the mental, the real and the ideal, are equally 
real manifestations in the actual universe — real not only 
in partial glimpses, as we find them, but in one perfect 
whole of interdependent co-operation. 

Every inference is a brief hypothesis. Every system of 
philosophy is a systematic series of hypotheses. Super- 
ficial thinkers are prone to believe that philosophy herself 
is continually being discredited, whilst, in fact, like the 
chambered nautilus, she is only building new apartments 
from time to time more ample than the former. The 
larger rooms are each more or less the direct outlook from 
previous sections. 

Sight and insight ! they are both perceptions, the one 
of things, the other of the relations between things ; both 
wait for mutual confirmation. The time has fully gone 
by in which science seriously objects to Philosophy. So 
has that in which Philosophy expects to obtain a knowl- 
edge of the cosmos merely by persistent thought. For- 
merly, Philosophy was in the ascendant. Then the 
situation was briefly reversed. It is only yesterday since 
it was claimed that Science — meaning by that great name 
not much more than the classified results of observation 
and experiment — had become permanently dominant. But 
behold ! men speedily awoke to the knowledge that not 



12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Science in this limited sense, but the theories, the rela- 
tionships, the principles, and laws — the non-material in all 
its forms, which underlies all science — was everywhere 
under discussion. Not scientific facts, but scientific 
hypotheses, had filtered with varying clearness into every 
alert mind of average intelligence. Theology was found 
to be vigorously combating, not accredited, described, 
or presented facts, but the philosophy which science was 
beginning seriously to adopt as its explanation of certain 
relationships between facts. 

Men stood in sudden fear that there might arise a life- 
and-death conflict somewhere. But it was not a conflict 
of matter with matter, but of mind with mind, of philos- 
ophy with philosophy, of explanation with explanation. 
Theology is philosophy of a variety somewhat special to 
itself, and it paused in fear of other philosophies. 

Certain potent theories had become a mental framework 
into which science workers in every department were 
depositing their treasures, with the acknowledged neces- 
sity of establishing either the adequacy or the inadequacy 
of theory to sustain and illumine their ever fresh dis- 
coveries. It began to be realized that without the aid of 
his revolutionary theory, his grand generalization of Nat- 
ural Selection, Mr. Darwin would never have reached the 
marvellous number or the surprising accuracy and intelli- 
gence of his own personal observations, nor would he have 
collected, systematized, and rendered astonishingly more 
fruitful the observations of others. Without his theory he 
could never have achieved a hundredth part of his success 
in stimulating fresh zeal for scientific discovery and demon- 
stration ; nor without this could he have quickened the 
civilized world into keen interest or into substantial, if 
modified, acceptance of his conclusions. 

But also without Mr. Darwin's grand array of witness- 
ing facts, supplemented by other like accumulations from 
all quarters, the theory would have fallen dead — at least 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. 1 3 

temporarily. If there is no life in observed details except 
as they are vitalized by some rational interest, with such 
an interest the dryest facts, the heaviest statistics, the 
most distasteful items, become more fascinating than 
music or poetry. All great authorities in science are 
men who have been made illustrious by the discovery 
of some new but non-material principle through which 
many groups of data are bound together and made 
comprehensible. Facts prove the principle and lift it 
beyond the sphere of untested inference, into the domain 
of assured knowledge. 

Thus, Science is an orderly arrangement of established 
data, illuminated and classified by Philosophy ; and Phil- 
osophy is an interpretation of the deeper meaning, of the 
rational significance and relational dependence of the data 
presented by Science. Neither is without the other ; to- 
gether they present but one perceived and recognized 
related reality in its different aspects. 

This reality is both objective and subjective — these two 
phases arising also in correlation. 

The related, the conditioned, the limited, is truly but 
one vast complex of purely modal realties, of unlimitedly 
varied modifications arising through different and increas- 
ingly complicated co-operations. But underlying these 
changes is Power, Force, Energy, — Existence, uncondi- 
tioned, absolute, unlimited, infinite. Such Being — the 
acknowledged substratum of all changes — is also the con- 
cern both of science and of every philosophy. To many 
this totality of existence — persisting through all duration — 
can be known to us only as a negation of the relative. To 
the " Synthetic Philosophy " our knowledge of it is at once 
the most positive affirmation ; yet this something, the Force 
which we so strenuously affirm, is the Unknowable. One 
portion of our discussion must be an inquiry into the na- 
ture, the limits, and the modes, by which we have acquired 
enough knowledge of non-relative existence to deal with 



14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

it intelligently in any sense whatever; and whether 
or not in parallel ways, as we hold, one can gain positive 
knowledge of, and positive knowledge about, absolute and 
unlimited Being. 

Meantime in our realistic related theories, all experience 
is a real of its own kind. Wrong conclusions are wrong 
in inference, are subjective mistakes, because of their nar- 
rowness or chosen fancifulness, not because a rational 
mind has any least tendency to become irrational. 

No system of thought offered in explanation of things 
has ever become extensively truly believed unless appar- 
ently self-evident ; unless it could be reasonably justified 
as judged simply from the point of view of its most 
strenuous advocates. We need only to put ourselves in 
the place, scrupulously and rigorously in the exact posi- 
tion, of any school of opinion, ancient or modern, in order 
to find evident reasons for fully believing the outlook to 
be rigidly commensurate with the theory held. Given 
that horizon only as the boundary of vision, the opinion 
can be made to appear essentially valid. The point of 
view may be low and the outlook narrow, but there is a 
sure correspondence between these and the line of thought, 
however really illogical when judged by any higher 
standard. 

Looking out now into barbarism or into any lower phase 
of belief, or groping backward into the various vagaries 
of opinion from the dawn of history to the present time, 
this truth of correlated action and reaction between ob- 
jective data and subjective theory will become more 
apparent the more thoroughly we enter into all the cir- 
cumstances. Unless there is some ulterior, self-blinding 
motive to bias the judgment, no one, except on sheer au- 
thority, can accept a belief if it does not commend itself 
either to heart or intellect. 

The weakest myths, as symbols,, mean something ; 
though early traditions were shallow and needlessly gro- 



IN TROD UC TOR Y. 1 5 

tesque, because, like children who delight in " make 
believe/' the people amused themselves by embellishing 
their highest truths with less than half-believed fancies. 
That any inconsequent mythology, if literally understood 
by those who held it, was yet fully accepted by them, 
seems to be vastly improbable. 

Each mythical story rises in dignity just in proportion 
to the dignity of its embodied meaning. Folk-lore of the 
graver sort, handed down through the council-fire-talks 
or nursery repetitions of many peoples and many genera- 
tions of the same peoples, gives various evidence that it 
has been nowhere more than half literally accepted. It 
was adopted largely as a superstition, as a something 
kindred with the dark ; how much was true and how much 
false belonged to the unknowable. In prosperity it was 
forgotten, but was resorted to in adversity ; and it influ- 
enced conduct with a vacillating power, as circumstances 
made the half-believer brave or cowardly at the moment. 
Many of the minor superstitions of to-day influence and 
partially enslave certain classes of minds in precisely that 
manner. Fun and earnest become curiously intermingled, 
as we find it in the plays of Halloween and similar inheri- 
ted divinations practised by our own young people, but 
where the amusement ends and belief begins neither they 
nor we can quite determine. The most absurd fetishes 
still elicit faint traces of credence. 

Wherever belief has risen to the dignity of a religion 
with an established worship, there, along with indications 
of childish pretence and evidences of mingled doubt and 
acceptance, is also an embodiment of the best and highest 
truths then and there known. Promises are given of the 
most which can be hoped for, and efforts are proposed for 
warding off the worst which is dreaded. The founder of 
the faith seems to have honestly tried to discover and 
to accept something credible and helpful to himself and 
others. He has embodied the best he could attain to 



1 6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

with much pondering, and he truly has gained new and 
grand beliefs as measured by those of his contemporaries. 

His truth mingled with puerile enthusiasms and in- 
herited superstitions, yet in the main it was a philosopher 
who gave of his best as he saw it and as he attempted to 
establish it for the guidance of others. 

We may fairly infer that no early worship originated 
exclusively or mainly in that solemn despair of finding 
truth, which, failing to find it, could deliberately stoop to 
invent lies in the guise of beliefs, symbols, and hopes, to 
be used for promoting the simple good of the many, who 
might be expected to find courage and strength from the 
acceptance of such pure fictions. The great beliefs were 
there — if consciously embellished to some extent by 
puerile, half-believed fictions still useful for the dark days. 

Later teachers, founders of new, or fresh expounders of 
old, faiths or sects may be more freely credited with the 
sceptical spirit of expedient pious frauds. There is much 
temptation to this, as it may so easily arise half uncon- 
sciously in seeking to uphold a partially outgrown faith, 
or any portion of a formulated creed. Consistency for 
one's self and in the eyes of others, the spirit of excited 
partisanship, a bid for popularity, pecuniary considera- 
tions, personal ambitions in any form, undoubtedly lead 
towards a modern insincerity which is as unwilling to face 
the light, even in its own consciousness, as the most extra- 
vagant myth-makers could have been in the earlier ages. 

Then there is the woful lack of self-confidence, the doubt 
as to where concessions will lead in the final outcome, and 
the general fear of evil results. Besides, it is felt that the 
mighty truths are really there as a basis ; they are the 
lights which shine part way even into the dark places 
where cowardice and any taint of insincerity neglect to 
look too scrupulously. 

But to continue to teach any body of doctrines or 
dogmas, religious or secular, which are neither believed 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. 1 7 

from apparently conclusive evidence, nor held upon the 
responsibility of some supposed higher authority that 
one dare not question, nor held to by the unreasoning 
glow of fervid temperament, would be so intolerable, if 
there were no blinding power of self-deception, that down- 
right hypocrisy in teaching acknowledged falsehood must 
be very exceptional. But men differ in moral calibre ; and 
coupled with prestige, position, power, wealth, and an un- 
settled code of morals, one must grant the possible temp- 
tations. Doubtless it is harder to maintain unyielding 
integrity in the presence of partial truths whose limitations 
are recognized by one's self, but not outgrown in the 
thoughts, still less in the feelings, of the majority, than to 
be upright in adopting opinions concerning which no 
prejudice has yet given a popular verdict. 

Difficulties of this class apply with almost equal force 
to all classes of progressive knowledge — social, govern- 
mental, religious, philosophical, and scientific. The pride 
of consistency, the conceit of a personal omniscience, the 
clannishness of partisan feeling, the love and reverence for 
the opinions of one's ancestors or one's revered teachers, 
and the active sympathy for one's early and much cher- 
ished and most honestly adopted convictions, are all so 
many formidable lions in the way of all genuine progress. 
If the world could learn to thoroughly and cordially accept 
the fact that, in the very nature of things, growth in knowl- 
edge — mental growth, — like organic growth, must be not 
only a continuous assimilation, but also and almost equally 
a continuous disassimilation or a giving up of outgrown 
opinions, human advancement would at once become 
more than fourfold in rate and tenfold in the directness 
of its progress. 

Let it become clearly recognized that the phenomenal, 
the most superficially or distortedly apparent, is not the 
false, but the narrow ; is not the sheerly delusive, but the 
non-discriminated, and that conclusions based upon the 



1 8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

most shallow perceptions are true in the light of that point 
of vision, but must be abandoned as soon as a wider 
outlook has been gained, as certainly as a child must put 
on new garments when he has outgrown the old, and with 
no more shadow of discredit in the one case than in the 
other. 

The much-quoted dispute over the shield with its two 
faces is in point. But vastly more is meant here than that 
incident illustrates. When the child believes he sees the 
green color in the tree, he does see it there ; that is, he 
sees the objective cause of the green color which really 
does belong to the tree ; he is looking at and thinking 
only about the object, and he has not yet thought of any 
relation between his feelings and their objective cause. 
His conclusion is legitimate from the only point of view 
which he has yet gained. If he tastes one of the apples 
which has fallen from the tree he affirms that he is tasting 
a sweet apple ; and again, looking only at the objective 
side of the case, he is right in his inference. 

But question the child. Ask him if he believes that the 
feeling of sweetness in his mouth is in the apple also. As 
soon as he entirely understands the question he promptly 
answers no. That is not in the least his idea when he 
affirms that the apple is sweet. He is only sure that it is 
the apple which gives him the sensation of sweetness, the 
leaves which make the impression of greenness ; and his 
cognition, his inference, gained from his premises, is as 
literally correct as that of the wisest scientific authority, 
who assures us that the sensations of greenness and of 
sweetness are purely subjective — that all feeling is in the 
mind and not in the object. 

Again, most people believe when they see a body which 
appears to be round and solid, like an apple, that the ap- 
pearance is real and not delusive. And so it is from that 
standpoint. Looking at only one side of the apple, they 
correctly infer both the completed roundness which they 



IN TROD UC TOR Y. 1 9 

would see if they looked at it on all sides, and the solidity, 
as resistance to pressure, which they would experience 
from a sense of touch. Judging from such premises as 
they have, they know the apple in its manifested proper- 
ties of roundness and solidity. So far as it goes, we 
maintain that this is a true and accurate knowledge of the 
manifested properties. They know that knowledge differs 
from the thing known. 

But a physicist has learned by various careful experi- 
ments that the apple is composed of small invisible pieces 
whose centres are really a very long way apart ; that these 
minute pieces are all in some kind of rapid motion, which 
is so swift that it leaves upon our vision an effect as 
though they completely filled the entire space — as a lighted 
brand moved swiftly to and fro seems to fill the whole 
space through which it moves. Of course the rapidly re- 
curring push which these little particles give where any 
attempt is made to displace them is equivalent to a per- 
petual resistance when estimated by our slow senses. 

The knowledge of the physicist is both immensely more 
minute and comprehensive, more learned and more able 
to justify its conclusions by logical appeals to the testi- 
mony of the facts ; his premises have become marvellously 
expanded into new and wider relationships, but we main- 
tain that, given their respected premises to judge from, 
the cognition of the common man as to the properties of 
the apple are as correct as those of the physicist. Thus 
perceptions gained through the unsupplemented senses 
are as accurate from his standpoint as are those of the 
other from his higher and wider outlook. 

Knowledge is knowledge of data which come into 
our experience. We perceive so much as we do perceive, 
and we make our inferences accordingly ; but the baby 
as soon as he observes anything, observes a real object, 
whatever that may be, and not a delusion. So soon as he 
begins to reason, there is nothing in the nature of things 



20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

which should prevent his judgments from being as true to 
their own data as Sir Isaac Newton's were to his. 

What then shall we say of apparitions which have no 
" objective reality " ; of dreams, fancies, and illusions of 
all kinds ? Simply that the mind being correlatively under 
the domination of a disordered nervous mechanism, this 
organic machine more or less forces and controls the per- 
ceptions, even introducing its resultant phantasm, which 
becomes the real object perceived — a kind of real which 
may or may not have some extra-organic basis. A man 
seen through a fog may be taken for a giant, an old dress 
in the moonlight may take on the sly, cruel face of a 
robber, and a grating noise afar off may sound like very 
sweet music near at hand. Such examples only show that 
more than one objective cause co-operates in producing 
every perception, and that the mind itself is in some way 
a co-partner powerful enough to make its own mental at- 
titude the platform from which its own operations uni- 
formly proceed. That the mind often sees about what it 
expects to see, is very fair evidence of the potency which 
it can bring to bear in its study of things and the nature 
of things. 

Our position then is that the character of every percep- 
tion and of every cognition, and of every mental act of 
all kinds is dependent in definite degrees upon each and 
all of the co-operating factors, psychical and physical, 
which together make up the entire process of every act in 
which the sensibility is consciously concerned. In other 
words, all change, all action (change and action include 
both feeling and motion), is so entirely under the control 
of definite law that the sequence of every thought is fully 
determined by its correlatives of all kinds, in the sense 
that it must obey the associated laws of thought and of 
things. The mind must perceive objects, must know 
them, and must reason about them legitimately — in true 
accord with its own mental attitude working in correspond- 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. 2 1 

ence with the organism and the extra-organic world. 
Thus, under normal conditions, every mind is compelled 
to recognize and to accept the evidence presented to it 
and adequately comprehended, with precisely as much 
certainty as it must have the sensation of a tree when 
with healthy open eye the attention is directed towards 
the tree. The clear cognition is in no sense a matter of 
choice provided all of the accompanying conditions unite 
in producing it. 

But one may close his eyes, doubtless according to 
accurately established laws, but certainly entirely at his 
own option, provided he has the proper control of his 
organism. In that case the tree may be there still, and 
may be still actively soliciting his attention, which he 
refuses to give by opening his eyes and looking at it, and 
consequently he does not perceive the tree. 

In an analogous way one may close off the representa- 
tive vision, the insight into the nature and relations of 
things, and in this way he may refuse to reach any con- 
clusion which is presented to him. The mind has a par- 
allel kind of liberty to blind itself to represented knowledge 
of any kind, and to shut itself off from sensations of 
any kind ; but provided all of the normally correlated 
factors are in full co-operation, true and adequate cogni- 
tion is as inevitable as sensation. The blind man can 
learn nothing about the world through the visual organs ; 
the near-sighted person, without the aid of glasses, has a 
much more limited range of vision than his neighbor; 
one with diseased nerves may see things double or quad- 
ruple or topsy-turvy, in any way that his nerves direct ; and 
by a like weakness, non-development or abnormal de- 
velopment of the co-operative organism, the intellectual 
powers may be compelled to act feebly or perversely. One 
may be a brilliant reasoner one day and a practical idiot 
the next — not because the individuality is lost or de- 
stroyed, but because it has lost the present possibility 



22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

of taking part in those co-operative processes which 
evolve rational sensibility. If skilfully trepanned a 
week later, the whole mental activity may be restored 
by the restoration to normal action of its co-operative 
allies — the delicate tissues of the unconstrained nerv- 
ous mechanism. Nature's co-partnerships are all con- 
ducted with equal exactness and equity. Her operations 
are all co-operations. 

Why then condemn the masses, male or female, to a 
prolonged childhood through any insincerity of teaching? 
The true policy of the leaders in education must be that 
of encouraging every one to acquire truth confidently for 
himself. The worst opinions, if diligently obtained by 
personal effort, are better for a man than the best blindly 
accepted traditions. Nothing but use ever yet has 
strengthened faculty. Individual effort is the one rock 
upon which to ground the true Republic in every depart- 
ment of inquiry, and only through universal activity can 
arise the compacted solidarity of results, even in the high- 
est reaches of philosophy and in the deepest problems 
of science. 

The crudest opinions doubtless will abound to the vex- 
ation of wiser souls under any system which fosters inde- 
pendent judgment ; sects and divided councils may become 
as many and as inevitable in physical and psychical inquiry 
as they have become in the religious world since Martin 
Luther's time ; but all these are the stepping-stones to a 
higher level, though for the time not joyous but grievous 
to on-lookers. 

Mankind will investigate any subject in which they feel 
a personal interest and the sense of responsibility. They 
are perforce keen observers, reasoners, philosophers. No- 
where have they received too much, but everywhere too 
little incitement to investigate for themselves, and to state 
their own conclusions freely. Given a fair field, manifold 
physical Nature will do her share of that co-operative work 



INTROD UCTOR Y. 2$ 

which evolves all personal sensibility. Every related truth 
is enfolded somewhere within the activities of ever-chan- 
ging but endless and forever correlated processes. The 
external reals will become each a witness for itself, and 
also for its associates. 

The fundamental principles upon which any scheme of 
thought and investigation is grounded must determine the 
character of the system even to many unexpected details. 
With every fresh shaping of basal elements emerge modi- 
fied aspects and explanations of the most familiar phe- 
nomena. This is not because the thinker willingly attempts 
to discredit teachings of justly credited, learned, venerated, 
great authorities, but because the new outlook, like the 
successive earlier ones, compels consistency of perception 
from the new point of view, compels revision and re- 
statement to the verge of unwarranted assumption. To 
withhold what one thinks he sees and knows would be 
the sheerest cowardice. 

New aspects, by presenting other relationships, and old 
ones under a modified light, necessitate revised explana- 
tions. Pitfalls surround every fresh enterprise. Weak or 
badly instructed minds easily put themselves into unten- 
able positions ; they observe carelessly or reason inconse- 
quently ; but each can only do his own best. It remains 
true, that observed deficiencies in concrete facts and their 
explanations, gaps unfilled, dark places unillumined, have 
always tended to push inquiry backward to first principles ; 
these, revised from time to time, every dependent inter- 
pretation of phenomena has received successive re-inter- 
pretation — with a general broadening both of the field of 
inquiry and of accepted knowledge. More intelligible, 
more vitally dependent relationships have steadily emerged 
in this way from that vast assemblage of existences and 
changes grouped as phenomena, and verbally unified as 
Nature ; but not yet unified in thought to the satisfaction 
of the philosophers of modern science. 



24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

The present writer keenly feels the possibility of an 
unjustified audacity, both in attempting to revise the first 
principles and to make the subsequent applications — espe- 
cially the latter. Very abstract theories are difficult to 
disprove. They may hold their own creditably enough 
for years or centuries ; but when used in explaining the 
familiar facts of mind and matter and their every-day 
succession of changes, there may arise an ordeal from 
which one would most willingly escape. But to clear and 
positive convictions about subjects which concern the 
welfare of all, there is no escape ; and there is no way of 
proving any theory except that of testing it by the re- 
lated facts. Hence the present essay, which is itself a 
revised, a broadened, a more full attempt at verification 
of a system of thought less matured in the author's former 
works, Studies in General Science, and The Physical Basis 
of Immortality. Truth, when discovered, can find ways 
of getting itself so indisputably demonstrated, that it must 
become accepted. They who are best informed must first 
give it their undoubting credence. They best know 
whereof they affirm. If science would become an inven- 
tive art and avail itself of all the natural resources at its 
command its progress could hardly be overestimated. 

Philosophy, aiming to be " the complete and accurate 
expression of the essential relativity of the world, formu- 
lated in the most general propositions," cannot be experi- 
mentally tested at every step, like the concrete sciences ; 
but at each new move it can be challenged to halt and 
maintain its assumed advance. It must covet attack from 
every source, realizing that rational criticism wields a 
spear-point that searches out and exposes the weak places 
of defective theory. 

Attempting, as it does, the satisfactory explanation of 
all things substantial or relational, to be of ultimate value 
philosophy must reach down to abiding foundations, 
deep, solid, broad, and obvious enough to gain acceptance 



INTRODUCTORY. 



25 



from all thinkers who will make themselves adequately 
well informed. Such foundations undoubtedly exist, and 
wait to be discovered. If they had been found and 
clearly brought into view, they would have been recog- 
nized and generally accepted. The great diversity of 
philosophic opinion is conclusive evidence that the final 
generalization has not yet made its appearance. 

Until mankind have reached an all-comprehensive 
unanimity in philosophy, and a corresponding unification 
of science, there needs no apology for yet another attempt 
to find stable and non-paradoxical First Principles, which 
may take us yet a step nearer to the ultimate goal. 




THE SCOPE AND CHARACTER OF THE 
INQUIRY. 

Whoever seeks to construct a philosophy of Existence, 
absolute and relative — a philosophy which shall com- 
prehend the total of Being and the total of its changes, 
actual or possible, will probably recognize the gravity of 
the undertaking. Yet the attempt is not too ambitious. 
Humanity has never rested, will never rest, can never rest 
content till it has found satisfactory explanations adequate 
to include and interpret all things. 

This is not equivalent to affirming that finite minds 
may hope to realize comprehensively the nature of in- 
finite, absolute Being with its unconditioned attributes. 
To know that the Unlimited Absolute actually exists, 
and must permanently exist, is one knowledge ; to fathom 
and adequately to apprehend such infinite realities, is 
quite another. That the total of existences must be an 
absolute total — the whole of Existence, — we are compelled 
to think whenever thought about it becomes self-consistent. 
With the progress of knowledge it has come to be ad- 
mitted by all who have studied the subject, that the ever 
persisting, Being per se, can become, does become, neither 
more nor less. It cannot be thought to vary by either 
increasing, diminishing, or substantially changing ; it 
simply is ; it remains. 

Neither can it be thought that this total of Being at 
any time began to be, or at any time can cease to be ; it 

26 



THE SCOPE AND CHARACTER OE THE INQUIRY. 2J 

is continuously one and the same through limitless Dura- 
tion, the actual only permanent Reality in itself. 

Duration is the Idea, the attribute, which expresses the 
continuance of this infinite and absolute Real. Duration 
is, while Being is, and because Being is, and persists; 
exists in absoluteness perfect and complete within itself. 

Materialists and Idealists alike accept the fact that 
abiding changelessness underlies and somehow sustains all 
changes. It is the substance of all phenomena. This some- 
thing in itself, as the totality of all things, must substan- 
tially include all phenomena ; must in some way originate 
all phenomena. These propositions have become axioms : 
something cannot arise from nothing ; something cannot 
lapse into nothing. The world of the forever-changing 
must be in some way evolved from, and in some way up- 
held in antithesis to, the abiding reality. We must en- 
deavor then to rationally comprehend, and be able intel- 
ligibly to state at least a possible, a distinctly thinkable 
method by means of which this superficial paradox can be 
merged into an entirely consistent, comprehensive whole. 

The enduring Totality is the Real to which Duration 
responds as the Ideal. If there could be an independent 
stream of Time down which Being absolute might have 
come from the past to the present, and with which it could 
move on to the future, nothing else exists by which to 
measure or estimate such change. Nothing indicates the 
possibility of such progression. If it occur, it is as though 
it were not. No change to which the whole of Being 
could be subjected could become appreciable to our modes 
of thought, which recognize all changes as pertaining to 
parts of the whole as discriminated from other parts ; to 
times and places discriminated from other times and places. 

If total Being were moving on in infinite space, there 
would be nothing else to estimate that by ; it would be 
as though it were not. There would be nothing to 
measure from, to measure toward, or to measure by, or in 



28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

any way to indicate the direction of such change. The 
absolute total of Being must be, therefore, as unlimited 
spatially considered, as infinite extensively as it is in 
duration or protensively. Its extension is therefore an 
omnipresence. Ideal extensiveness or infinite space 
corresponds to unlimitedly extended Being per se y the 
Real. 

Again totality of Being must necessitate omnipotence. 
It includes all power, force, energy, the several names for 
the one real ; and however, whenever, wherever power is 
brought into exercise in the domain of the forever 
changing, in that act there is the immanence of the abso- 
lute in the relative. 

But what is The Relative ? Its most apparent charac- 
teristic is perpetual changeability, as certainly as the 
undisputed characteristic of the absolute is its non-change- 
ability. If the Absolute, as the Absolute, has varieties 
of action or passion, they belong to a type to which we 
are not adapted, which we do not and probably which we 
cannot comprehend — at any rate at our present stage of 
development. But the Relative may very fairly be desig- 
nated the inclusive, the apparently infinite complication 
of unresting changes. They arise in some order of suc- 
cession. But how ? 

The same piece of wax may take a thousand shapes ; 
but, while it continues to be the same wax, it will be 
neither more nor less in amount during the entire varying 
process of changing in form — which involves also some 
changing of place. Then if the wax has the shape of a 
round ball at one moment and in the next minute is 
pressed into the form of a square block and then into a 
triangular figure, these different forms must be progres- 
sively assumed and they must be assumed in succession — 
one form following another. These changes, then, occupy 
time as well as space ; but they are changes not in the 
substance of the wax but in some of its modes. They 



THE SCOPE AND CHARACTER OF THE INQUIRY. 29 

are changes not in the being or existence of the wax, but 
changes in its modes of being or existing. 

This piece of wax in its non-changeableness in the sup- 
posed illustration may stand as a symbol of the non- 
changeable Absolute ; and its changes of form in time 
and space as the type of the universal Relative. The 
modes of differentiation in the wax are all formal or 
modal in kind. If we are ready to concede that all of the 
changes, all of the possible modifications which have 
arisen or which may arise in the Relative, belong exclu- 
sively to the formal or modal order, and that all such 
changes arise as literally within the Absolute Being and 
are of the Absolute in the same sense in which the various 
differenced forms pertain to the wax, there will then be 
no trouble in thinking clearly and definitely how the 
Relative may have arisen from the Absolute ; may co-exist 
with it ; in a very distinct sense may be in apposition to 
it ; and yet that this emerging Relative may be some- 
thing very determinate, definite, and positively real in all 
of its own changes. 

The round form of a piece of wax, the cube of wax, the 
triangle of wax, are quite as obtrusive facts to our sensa- 
tions as is that other fact that it is wax which has taken 
these several different shapes. Forms and changes of all 
kinds are of peculiar and special interest to the mind ; 
they are the kind of things which are exact and measur- 
able in terms of quantity. All representation concerns 
itself with forms and their colors ; we delight in changes of 
all kinds in ourselves, in others ; and we study the changes 
in things much more than we study the things themselves. 
We belong to a real world of changeableness quite as 
characteristically as we belong to an order of unchange- 
ableness ; yet we belong to both. 

The piece of wax, insignificant as it is when compared 
with the abidingness of Total Being, has yet a limited 
positive abidingness or persistence when compared with 



30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

the changeability which can assume so many possible 
forms. It serves perfectly to illustrate two opposite types 
of co-existences both equally reals. It enables one to 
comprehend the adaptability, the innate fitness of the 
changeable to the unchanging. It suggests the inherent 
probability that some established order of modal changes 
should co-exist in connection with the abidingness of 
infinite and absolute Being. 

But the wax does not change of itself. Something 
must cause it to change, must act upon it to the same 
extent to which the wax reacts in resisting any change in 
its existing figure at each moment. A piece of iron of 
the same size or a piece of the same weight with the wax 
would resist change of form to a much greater amount 
than the wax. Very much more force must be brought 
to bear upon the iron in order to change its form from a 
round ball to the form of a cube. It appears from 
many and various experiments that the amount of power 
required to produce any change in a body acted upon 
must accurately equal the amount of power which 
that body can bring to bear in resisting such change. 
In other words, action and reaction in all physical pro- 
cesses must be equal and opposed in direction, and at 
that stage of co-operation the more dynamic mode will 
be able to overcome the resistance of the more static 
mode. 

The active mode does the work of undoing any condi- 
tion of a body upon which it acts, provided that condition 
has arisen from a loss by distribution of free motion in 
excess of its own ; that is, all modes of force co-operate 
as quantitative equivalents and in their co-operations 
they are active, true, correlated terms. But that term 
which represents the most free motion at any given 
instant, is the one which tends to communicate its mode 
to the other, and by that means to induce change in the 
relative condition of both bodies. 



THE SCOPE AND CHARACTER OF THE INQUIRY. 3 1 

This, as it seems, is an explanation of the nature of 
physical process which is very nearly or quite synonymous 
with the current theory. It means that all physical modes 
arise and can arise only in correlation with equivalent 
modes, and that everywhere there is a tendency in the 
more active energies to radiate or flow onward in the 
direction of least resistance, and in the more static modes, 
by pitting themselves against each other, to produce those 
fixed resistances which we usually term bodies, matter, or 
solid matter, as wax, iron, plants, animals. 

Correlation or equivalent co-operation then, in con- 
nection with greater and less degrees of freedom of 
motion in the co-operative terms, is the cause or method 
which eventuates in all physical changes in the domain of 
Relative Being. All material correlations are mutual 
limitations of modes, are equivalent exchanges of energies 
upon a rigidly quantitative basis. But such exchanges 
are related in space and time, and in effecting them there 
is motion — definite modes of motion arising on both sides 
and the exchanges are literally exchanges of these several 
modes of motion. These correlated energies act through 
spaces definite in amount ; they act, change in form, or 
move in times definite in amount, and their exchange of 
modes is a real exchange of modes of motion. The 
correlation, then, is a determinate correlation between 
equivalent modes of motion. Matter therefore must be 
in some way constituted through correlated modes of 
motion. All of its changes must be produced in various 
ways, but always through combinations, co-operations of 
many kinds, and equivalent exchange literally between 
definite modes of motion. 

If these positions can be sustained then the physical 
world is literally one vast complex of associated and per- 
petually modifying and exchanging modes of motion, — of 
activities which are correlative at all points and in all 
times. 



32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

But the piece of wax of our illustration, although in 
substance permanent and unchanging as compared with 
its changes of form, can be chemically dissociated till its 
divided particles will be no longer wax, but chiefly carbon. 
An atom of carbon has not yet been artificially subdivided, 
though it is not improbable that it may be hereafter. 
This particle of carbon and others like itself can assume 
many differentiated forms and yet remain carbon, but 
there must come a point at which, if the least particle of 
carbon is indeed constituted by primary correlated 
motions, should these ultimate correlations be disso- 
ciated, the divided parts would not only be no longer 
carbon but they would be no longer in relation, and 
would no longer belong to relative existence. We may 
divide all secondary relativities, such as arise in forming 
chemical compounds ; but in the nature of things primary 
correlated terms, if divided, must destroy the relativity 
itself, — must return the energy whose modes of action had 
been conditioned to progress in mutual dependence, back 
into the realm of the unchanging. 

Our problem does not involve any question of the 
infinite divisibility of matter as something to be cut into 
endlessly smaller and smaller pieces. Our atom is inde- 
structible so long as the primary terms which constitute it 
one individual atom are maintained in their integrity. 
Should all of these be dissociated, Relative Being would 
exist no longer. Everything would have returned into 
the undifferentiated Absolute — a catastrophe which it 
seems needless to contemplate. 

It is evident, then, that if the ultimate unit of the 
Relative is a permanent somewhat, conditioned by primary 
correlation which relates to forms and modes of changes, 
that this ultimate somewhat is the true permanent indi- 
viduality, and that it is an individuality in some way com- 
posed of endlessly changing forms and other modes which 
but repeat themselves, with modifications, in an endless 



THE SCOPE AND CHARACTER OF THE INQUIRY. 33 

round or rhythm of changes. It appears that the least 
element of relative being must be persistently individual- 
ized. It is constitutionally indivisible and indestructible, 
because it is a true correlated existence. 

That there is an ultimate atom of matter is now almost 
universally believed. The only difference is, our theory 
maintains that the true origin and reason of the atomic 
existence and equally of its persistence must be found in 
its own innate but actively energetic correlativity. The 
correlativity and its inherent activity are both purely and 
exclusively atomic, but the individual atoms co-operate 
also interatomically, and through such copartnerships 
the purely atomic modes become increasingly modified 
though they remain exclusively atomic. 

In other words, absolute energy is brought into new uses 
through a conditioned system of methodical correlated 
changes, and it is our purpose to inquire into the nature, 
the relations, the modes, the results of these conditioned 
changes. 

As we hold that one indestructible result is the per- 
sisting atom of rhythmic motion or matter, if individual 
mind is also a permanent correlated existence, either it 
must exist wholly independent of matter or it must be 
conditioned in the same correlative group with the mate- 
rial atom and inseparable from it, though differentiated 
from it as a distinct kind or class of changes special to 
itself and specially conditioned in its own behalf. We 
assume that the latter is the true explanation — that mind 
and matter are two aspects of one being. Independent 
of all facts, it seems more probable that if a type of 
relative being was to be instituted it would be established 
in accordance with one general plan having many varie- 
ties, rather than that two distinct kinds of individuality 
should be separately started into being, each to be forever 
acting independently along its own independent lines. 
This would mean two distinct Relatives, each correlated 



34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

in itself, but entirely out of relation with the other. No 
one has ever held that assumption consistently, unless 
possibly Leibnitz. 

But the facts all militate against the theory of two 
separate relativities. As minds work in and through 
bodies, the two are certainly in relation. But all influen- 
tial relation implies correlation — equivalent co-operation. 
To affirm that mind and matter are efficiently related is to 
affirm that they are correlated, each producing some 
equivalent effect upon the other in all co-operation. 

The working character of these several differentiated 
correlativities must occupy a large part of our attention. 
How and why mind and matter co-operate, the nature of 
the modifications, of the evolution which results to both ; 
in what sense they are two, and in what still more intimate 
sense they are but one inherently conditioned unity, are 
matters with which we are deeply concerned. And in 
turning from the Conditioned back to the Unconditioned 
we may find that the light which has gathered about our 
pathway is reflected back a little way into even its 
fathomless depths. 

Whatever being or thing permanently exists must be 
known or knowable to any mind competent to recognize 
its existence and its characteristics. Whatever existence 
changes or acts according to definite methods must be 
recognizable as to its processes by every mind competent 
to appreciate the nature of such methods. Mind is, sub- 
jectively considered, a feeling power ; objectively related, 
it is a perceiving and knowing power. It has only properly 
to relate itself to the object, in a common process, when 
knowledge becomes the subjective resultant as certainly 
as when two motions, by a given process of co-operation, 
produce a perfectly definite resultant. This at any rate is 
the hypothesis of the present essay, and a position to be 
illustrated and defended in the progress of the following 
discussion. 



THE SCOPE AND CHARACTER OE THE INQUIRY. 35 

Nothing is known or can be known, except so far as it 
is actually explained in consciousness. But consciousness 
never realizes fully the quantitativeness of things. On 
the contrary, it realizes or knows quantities in terms of 
qualities or degrees of tension, or of weights and densities ; 
as units and aggregates of units of a kind, etc. We per- 
ceive dimensions as they are presented to us ; we can our- 
selves represent them in thought or produce their likeness 
in a variety of materials, but we represent them as they 
were presented, and the apparent form, size, and general 
appearance is equally subjective and objective. 

Feeling is quality of experience ; and it is, as before 
noted, in terms of feeling that the objective reality is real- 
ized in consciousness. (Following the lead of Mr. Spencer, 
feeling, used in its broadest sense, includes all mental 
experiences.) But no one attempts to picture, mentally 
or otherwise, the dimensions of a mile, an acre, a circle 
around the earth, except by way of comparison. We 
measure distances by distances, quantities by like quanti- 
ties, amounts by their relations ; our conceptions are clear 
as to the kinds of which we are treating and as to the rela- 
tions between them, but these conceptions are gained 
through an experienced and related realization in the mind. 

Then, since it is impossible to image either a hundred 
miles or one mile, in that sense we assuredly do not know 
the Infinite ! But in that sense neither do we know any 
quantity beyond that which is actually presented to the 
senses. Except as a matter of reasoning and logical con- 
clusion, of legitimate inference, which is knowledge ; in 
other words, except as we realize all objective facts and 
processes in terms of subjective comprehension, the 
objective data remain unexplained, unknown. 

The theory that we must attempt to realize the how, 
the thinkable method of every process, before we can be said 
to comprehend it, may afford a clue to the method of the 
following discussion. 



WHAT IS MOTION? 

The falling of a leaf, the movement of a stone tossed 
from the hand, the revolution of a planet about the sun, 
thought of as pure motions, are not generally supposed 
to be identical in kind with the substance of the leaf, the 
stone, and the planet. But the theory that matter is 
exclusively motion, is composed of variously associated 
elements of pure motion, is steadily gaining adherents 
and gaining in probability. 

Of course it is understood that motion, forever chan- 
ging as it is, is yet informed by persisting power ; and that 
every motion stands for a given amount of power, force, 
energy. It can be shown also that every motion has a 
definite amount of extension, actual space-occupancy, 
that its distinctive function is to change in form or 
mode, acting in or through space in some definite related 
time, and that the rate and amount of its action decides 
the amount of power brought into active exercise. 

With such material to aid us in gaining a clear concep- 
tion of what motion is, what it means, and what it can 
do, it ought not to be very difficult for one to realize that 
even motion, so endowed, besides being mathematically 
provided for as to all of its modes and directions by other 
motions which determine for it the exact character of its 
reactions, may prove to be entirely adequate to build up 
the most solid matter and to literally aggregate and 
"stress" itself into every known physical substance of 
the existing universe. 

36 



WHAT IS MOTION? 37 

All philosophers recognize the persisting and the chan- 
ging to be generically unlike but inseparable aspects of 
related existence. They recognize the fact that every 
change is dependent in some way upon other changes, 
that every change of every kind, physical or psychical, 
is indebted to other changes either for the possibility of 
having a modal or correlative existence at all, or at any 
rate for its particular modes or forms of existing and 
changing. Its related indebtedness may include, as we 
hold that it does, both of these differenced causative 
conditions. 

All limitation is correlative. Everything which occurs 
in space and time is a product of changes correlated in space 
and time. A rhythmic atom of matter is one continuity of 
simultaneous and successive dependent changes correlated in 
space and time. Some aspects of the physical world are 
called matter, others are called motions ; but, interpreted 
by the rhythmic-atom theory, matter is purely motion. 
The tangible bodies termed substances are composed of 
interfering activities called motions, which occupy space 
and time ; and being opposed in direction their interfer- 
ences produce tensions, mutual resistances, which cumu- 
latively result in tangible extensions. Visible motions 
are the translations of these masses — translations pro- 
duced by outside correlated motions. Free motions, 
commonly called energies, are the dynamic overplus sent 
elsewhere whenever tensions or static modes are formed. 

Individual minds, our own and others, are held to be 
each one continuity of simultaneous and successive de- 
pendent changes correlated in time and sentience, or con 
sciousness. They are the inseparable living phases of the 
rhythmic changes — the feelings or emotions produced with 
the motions. 

That persisting power is immanent in all changes is 
freely conceded by every one. The conditioned individual 
becomes both the immanence and the changes — these 



38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

latter being endlessly necessitated amongst themselves 
and by themselves because they are innately conditioned 
together — each phase of change a mathematical func- 
tion of the allied changes of its correlates. It is the uses 
of immanent power which are conditioned. 

We live in a world where there are both unchanging 
and changing various relativities. Phenomena of all 
kinds are related more or less closely, so that not 
only are all operations co-operations, but all substances, 
properties, qualities, places, distances, directions, exten- 
sions, affirmations, negations, — everything, in brief, per- 
taining to this world about which we can either think 
or speak, in every aspect, is in some way in relation to 
something else. Our own perceptions and other senti- 
ent or felt experiences are known to be themselves the 
products of active correlativities. Scientific thought has 
accepted, or is rapidly approaching, this conclusion, and 
it is one which can be readily tested and confirmed. 

It follows that if there is an abiding unity of living or 
sentient being, conditioned by its own innate correlativ- 
ities ; if there is an ultimate physical atom which per- 
sists in the midst of all formal changes because of its 
correlated oneness ; and if these unlike aspects of Rela- 
tive Being are related in a still more complex many-sided 
individuality, as this essay maintains that all known facts 
indicate that they must be, then each phase of this con- 
ditioned individual should not only exist and act for itself, 
and according to its own laws, but the action, the modifi- 
cations, the changes of each should be accompanied by cor- 
responding associated changes in its correlative. 

Since the changes of the one are motions in time and 
space, and the changes of the other are feelings which arise 
in time and consciousness, they may be but the two sides 
of one and the same changes. But the feelings are not 
motions. They do not, therefore, come properly into the 
present chapter of discussion. 



WHAT IS MOTION? 39 

All physical correlative terms are held to be, when com- 
prehensively apprehended, fixed in amounts as changeless 
quantities. They are, other things equal, real invariants 
in extensions, motions, and methods ; in their sum of 
internal properties and modifications; in their sum of 
active and static energies. 

If correlativity means anything fundamental in the 
economy of the universe, it must apply to the executive 
side of things ; it must govern the working methods, the 
times, places, and modes of changes, par Eminence ; it 
must establish a mathematics for all quantitative co- 
operations, and determine the exact equivalence between 
the different modes in every process. Where the changes 
are qualitative the correlations themselves may be differ- 
entiated in kind ; but for the present we are concerned 
only with quantities and their modes, with motion and its 
methods. 

To define motion to be simply change of place, is to 
define it in very much the same sense in which a child 
might define color and form to be exclusively in the object. 
It is defining the reaction, not the joint action and re- 
action, which are one and inseparable both as cause and 
effect. 

We still speak of seeing visible motion, as though such 
perceptions were exclusively objective ; though it can be 
shown to be as certain that the mind and its organism 
add the apparent oneness and solidity to the motion, as 
they do to the form which moves. 

A non-relative change, if such changes can arise, might 
belong to the Absolute, but not to this universe where 
everything is relative. It follows that even the primary 
units of motion — the ultimate atoms of matter which per- 
manently persist — in some way presumably must be com- 
posed of, or constituted by the co-operation of exclusively 
correlative changes. In other words, every part of every 
motion must be at least two-phased ; each phase arising 



40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

and progressing with definite modifications in time and 
space because of inseparable dependence upon its active 
correlative. 

A correlation which produces any given motion may be 
either transient or permanent ; but every ultimate unit of 
motion which enters into the larger, composite whole, 
must act its part by virtue of its own indivisible terms. Its 
inherent correlativity constitutes its unity, its indivisibility 
except through its own destruction. 

This, in brief, is the motion theory of matter which 
the present paper endeavors to state fully and definitely ; 
to illustrate in its practical assumed aspects by the aid 
of diagrams ; and to apply with considerable detail in 
explanation of many of the various phenomena of nature. 

Newtonian laws of motion are regarded as especially 
the laws of translation, plain and rotary. Satisfactory in 
practice, they are justified in theory only by the third law 
— that motion involves both action and reaction. Rest, 
inaction, may exist as between one system of motion and 
another ; but in any motion considered by itself, if motion 
is innately related change, there can be no actual or rela- 
tive rest ; yet there must be a pivotal position about 
which the opposed terms hold each other in perpetual 
balance. This means that in every motion there is at 
once antagonized movement and a resulting stress — which 
together establish their common centre of equipoise or 
gravity. 

Whenever that centre of correlated motions remains 
stationary relatively to their changes, the changes — of 
constructive necessity — must be rhythmic in kind — repeat- 
ing themselves in an endless succession of waves or pulses 
of a vibratory character. In the nature of the case, every 
such dependent system of changes, in continuous struc- 
tural equipoise both in time and space, must be a perpetual 
system. Influences from outside may modify its modes ; 
they can have no power to unsettle its inherent self-poise. 



WHA T IS MO TION ? 4 1 

Each of our hypothetic atoms is an abiding group of such 
equilibrated vibrations. These are the units of motion. 

But wherever the centre of gravity continuously changes 
in position relatively to a progressive action and reaction, 
as in all translatory motion, there the motion is not 
rhythmic except in its repeated details, but is being con- 
tinuously more or less transformed in mode. No two 
oppositely directed energies, both acting in space and 
time, can commingle, yet not together set up a neutral 
point which becomes their momentary centre of gravity, 
but their reciprocal relations may be gradually modified 
by the withdrawal of some energies and the incoming 
of others. 

By these means the present form or mode of every 
motion is of necessity decided for each constituent by 
the present modes of its associates, and vice versa. The 
result is frequent transformation in the modes of the 
process as a whole. The energy which each term of a 
relation brings into exercise is exclusively its own ; is its 
essential force. Motion is the composite, present modifi- 
cation of a process related in time and space, which, 
because of the inherent relativity of its character, can 
arise only through equal but variously modified action 
and reaction. The most fundamental conceptions of 
motion, and all adequate definitions of it, should include 
equally in both correlated terms the joint conception of 
moving and of being moved. In every line of movement 
there is both acting and being acted upon throughout. 
Doubtless power, energy, may exist and act without pro- 
ducing motion, but motion can arise only through modes 
of energy differentiated in related time and space. Every 
motion represents a definite amount of energy commonly 
estimated in but one direction. 

The principle of the lever, in which a long arm and 
light weight counterbalance a short arm and heavy weight, 
repeats itself in all processes : in every complex motion ; 



42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

in every stress, which is the joint pressure of opposed 
motions ; in every structure, which is an aggregation of 
co-operative motions and stresses ; in static conditions 
with their apparent equilibrium of rest ; and even in the 
almost purely dynamic radiation of energy. 

Does the action of correlativity fairly enter into the 
most authoritative definitions of motion ? It seems to be 
ignored in Newton's first and masked in his second law. 
More modern authorities appear to consider the fact of 
relativity in motion vaguely and often remotely — rarely 
bringing it to the front as the ever present cause in every 
process. Many physical terms still embody the cruder, 
earlier conceptions. Current phrases, if not hopelessly 
misleading, are calculated to foster the less discriminating 
earlier opinions, in the same way that frequent reference 
to positive and negative electricities tends to uphold out- 
grown electrical theories — despite the accompanying 
statements which discredit them. Visible bodies and 
their obvious changes in form and location, stubbornly 
put themselves forward as the legitimate types of motion 
in general — hence of motion as something entirely distinct 
in kind from the something moved. 

But beyond this, there seems to be a survival in some 
of the most scientific minds, and in their later theories, of 
the discredited doctrine that motion is a more active 
something which can be impressed upon a less active if 
not an inert substance called matter — called in its less 
compounded stages an atom, a molecule. Thus the 
kinetic theory of gases endows minute particles with a 
translatory, right-line progress ; it endows them with this 
right-line motion, which does not appear to be wholly a 
response to reciprocal motion. Even vortex atoms, 
vortex tubes, and gyratory whirls generally, seem to be 
the product of a foreign communication to portions of a 
fluid-ether, the communicated energy being different in 



WHAT IS MOTION? 43 

kind from the prior fluid attributes. The gyrations and 
the ether, both relative, are yet differentiated, not as 
unlike modes merely, but as unlike classes of things — still 
spoken of genetically as two, not as one. 

If any theory can be established which will interpret 
Nature's methods to be all of one type, but of many 
modifications, this is much to be desired ! 

Newton's straight-line course, which all bodies once 
started would continue to follow if not interfered with 
from without, Maxwell's right-line progression of mole- 
cules, and Thomson's endless vortices, to my apprehen- 
sion, all alike fail in providing for an absolute reciprocity 
in every form of motion. Translated structures, if them- 
selves but clusters of co-operative motions of greater and 
less co-operative permanence, from the very nature of such 
an aggregation, must be primarily composed of harmonic 
or rhythmic motions of some sort. Then, is it presumable, 
is it conceivable, that any group of vibratory changes, if 
suddenly thrust forward in space by a foreign translatory 
impulse, would not continually tend to absorb and retrans- 
form this obviously secondary and derived mode of 
motion not closely akin in mode to the primary rhythms? 

Every translation except that of planetary revolution — 
in some way continually reinforced — is gradually trans- 
formed, and, as a translation, is brought to an end. We 
attribute this result wholly to outside friction and to 
gravitation — working always in obvious connection with 
the internal reactions. But who can prove that internal 
actions and reactions do not also begin at once to trans- 
form the received translatory mode? Provided every 
action between any two bodies is in the nature of a stress, 
— and the highest authorities concede that it is—then just 
in so far as that stress ceases, the resulting translation 
must cease. 

Many new elements continually enter into every pro- 
longed visible motion. According to the new theory, 



44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

the ongoing of a stone tossed from the hand is as really- 
effected by many complex copartnerships — some of the 
partners going out and others coming in at every stage of 
the progress — as a planetary progress is a continuous loss 
and renewal of minor energies through the continual main- 
tenance of an endless, large reciprocity which involves vari- 
able reciprocity. 

A contact of motion with motion, entirely without fric- 
tion and resulting stress — especially when there is some 
opposition in the direction of the motions — is not to be 
thought of. But a small friction is a small stress or ten- 
sion ; and tensions in sufficient aggregation become visible 
masses. Tensions are mutually obstructed motions ; and 
the various obstructions are certainly adequate to produce 
all the effects of a manifold differentiated rigidity. Thus 
tensions in different juxtapositions can produce tangible, 
real masses, with all the known phenomena of resistances 
and apparent solidity. 

In the nature of things, all true correlatives are at once 
cause and effect. The correlative terms of every motion 
are active elements co-operating because of a constitu- 
tional necessity inherent in all actual correlates. There 
is nothing arbitrary apparent in any natural process. The 
processes are all products of reciprocal changes — as inevi- 
table as the rise of one scale of a balance while the other 
falls and its fall when the other rises ; as inevitable as the 
enlarging of the third angle in a triangle when the other 
two angles are diminished and its diminution when they 
are increased. Modification arises only through equiva- 
lent modification of all correlatives. 

An atom composed of correlated vibrations may be 
moved on as a whole from the outside — though not with- 
out some reciprocal action on its part ; — but its own 
rhythmic changes in time and space — internally initiated, 
correlatively necessitated and modifiable only in mutual 
dependence — must be movements, not of the atom as a 



WHAT IS MOTION? 45 

whole, but distinctively the appropriate and differentiated 
movements of its several parts. Their numerous modifi- 
cations, produced through foreign action, can arise only 
in exact internal equivalence and in exact accord with all 
innate structural conditions. 

Such an atom would be self-sufficing whether vibrating 
in isolation or in copartnership with other atoms. It would 
be self-moving in all of its parts, as many larger bodies 
are ; but not able to translate itself as a whole without 
help, as no larger bodies are. 

The transference from one position to another of a 
mass, or of any mode of energy, requires the co-opera- 
tion of several external reciprocating systems — systems 
which for the time co-operate upon the same principle of 
correlation as that which moves any two related terms 
exclusively within the atom. This unity of method can 
be best indicated in connection with practical applications 
of the rhythmic theory. The movement of masses is the 
motion of tensions. 

The extensiveness of motion as a total, and of any 
given motion measured by itself, must be the quantity of 
space actually occupied by the energy which that motion 
represents. The form of the motion varies, but not its 
amount ; then, as on our theory motion and matter are 
but two names for one reality, the extensiveness of matter 
— which because of its active operations we term motion 
— is Nature s unvarying constant. These changes called 
motion have taken active possession of certain amounts of 
space which they hold under all contingencies, against all 
intruders. 

In other words, matter or motion is the extensiveness 
of persisting force manifesting itself in the process of 
changing in forms and positions at definite rates. Its 
special modes at any given time are necessitated, are 
forced upon it by the interference of correlated motions, 
often oppositely directed, which tend to crowd themselves 



46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

into the places in which it is moving. As it crowds back 
in return, a stress arises ; new forms and slightly changed 
places are assumed by both correlates. It is through 
such mutual interferences, modified in every conceivable 
way by differentiated action and composition of the cor- 
related terms, that all compound substances assume new 
properties and all bodies are constantly taking new places 
and configurations. 

It is this double-sided changing in form and position, 
with rates of change definitely related in time, which con- 
stitutes the motion out of which the physical universe is 
progressively built up into tangible bodies. The hypoth- 
esis postulates a changeless mass, in quantity, but not in 
modes. The modes are infinite in variety and endless in 
their procession. 

Evidently the translation of bodies, generally regarded 
as the distinctive type of all motion, can be but an ex- 
tremely composite, and, as currently interpreted, a very 
delusive aspect of highly compound motion. It is largely 
the subjective perception, with its non-discriminative sen- 
sations, which gives to it a unity, on the same principle 
that it supplies a deceptive unity to the continuous band 
of light made by a rapidly swaying firebrand. 

In the case of the ribbon of light from the moving brand, 
the child at first attaches his own sensations to the object. 
When he has seen the brand repeatedly both at rest and 
in motion, he knows that his first supposition will no longer 
answer, though he still may be unable to properly explain 
the related facts. The man will answer promptly : that 
because the motion is so rapid it gives one the impression 
of completely filling the whole space through which the 
light is moved. But tell the same man that the motion 
which he sees when a stone is sent flying through the air 
is in reality made up of billions of infinitesimal motions 
running both to and fro, but on the whole making rapid 
forward progress, and seeming to his unreasoned percep- 



WHAT IS MOTION? 47 

tions to be but one simple ongoing because of the slow 
action of his physical senses, and he is entirely incredulous. 
Visible motion, like color, is both objective and subjective. 
If attention is turned to either term exclusively, the pre- 
sented phenomena, from that standpoint alone, may lead 
to the narrow, one-sided inference, either that the per- 
ceived motion is purely objective, or that it is purely 
subjective. 

The whole effect arises as a co-operation which includes 
subject, object, and all intervening co-workers in the com- 
plicated process established between them. 

Science has discovered that every physical co-operation 
is some form of stress set up by the joint action of the 
related terms. This means working relations between 
object and object, similar to those between subject and object 
in every act of sensation and perception — a relation in 
which an equal share of work is borne by each side simul- 
taneously. This precisely expresses our idea of the cor- 
relation essential between motion and motion under all 
conditions. The simplest and the most complicated 
co-operations are forever necessitated to work in a true 
and perpetual equilibrium of activities. 

The a priori probability is that the ultimate unit of indi- 
visible motion is a group of related modes which condition 
each other's modal changes, and, together, originate a 
successive rhythm of co-existent internal vibrations ; and 
that these, through inter-atomic co-operations, originate new 
modifications in the forms of the primary rhythm ; but 
with no change in the quantity of motion involved. The 
action through a definite space, determines a definite 
extension ; and as all such action is mutually limited, the 
extension, like the force, becomes a fixed quantity. 

Primitive or ultimate correlatives are inseparable ; the 
others are not, as a circle may or may not enclose a square 
or a triangle, but must have every part of its circumfer- 
ence equally distant from its centre. The circle, ideally 



48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

conditioned by inseparable correlates, is a true permanent 
individual of its own type. The atom really conditioned 
by inseparable modes of real energies working in active 
correlation, is the permanent individual of its own real 
type. The circle and the atom alike may assume any 
number of secondary relationships, provided these are 
compatible with the primary ones ; but this non-funda- 
mental class of relations, unlike the primary ones, may 
be unmade as readily as they are made. 

In the case of the atom, these added correlations mean 
inter-atomic co-operation, or some variety of combination 
between atom and atom, with resulting modifications in 
the rhythm of both. Such unions are but the uniting of 
complex strands or cords of determinate motions which 
can be dissociated with equal readiness. But the rhythm 
of a primary strand is indestructible, except as involving 
the destruction of the applied principle of correlation by 
virtue of which it gained an existence. A circle, seconda- 
rily conditioned to circumscribe a square and a triangle, 
and to be itself inscribed in a larger square and a larger 
triangle, may have perfect adjustments among all of these 
non-essential relativities ; but circle, triangles, and squares 
must each keep intact the primary correlations because 
of which it gained its geometrical, specially distinctive 
character. 

So the atom, associated in inter-atomic partnerships, 
must keep intact the primal constitution because of which 
it persists as a complex but indivisible unity. Here divi- 
sion of correlates would mean return into the Absolute. 
Conditioned material ultimates, if they exist, comprise the 
physical total of persisting reals. They are the true material 
individuals ; their co-operations determine the character of 
all physical processes. It is conceded that everything exists 
and acts in definite relations to other things ; then we 
should expect that the guiding principles of correlation 
would be permanently realized within the ultimate units 



WHAT IS MOTION ? 49 

of being. There, if anywhere, should correlated energies 
remain co-operative. 

Our atom of matter, then, is a unit of motions with 
innate energy enough to achieve vastly more than has yet 
been required of it by physical evolution. 

Every portion of every vibration or wave motion, like 
every part in a wave-length of light, having oppositely 
directed energies, limited by corresponding energies act- 
ing in accurate opposition, each part to its direct correlate, 
by mutual interference would, together, produce check, 
strain, tension, to be the next instant re-transformed into 
active motion. The sum of the tensions and motions, 
as in the pendulum swing, would remain a definite quan- 
tity. Each semi-detached line of motion is like the path 
of a pendulum ; but in the place of the translated solid 
is the reversal of the wave-front in the to and fro current 
of a fluidity. 

To the average man a motion begins and ends. It 
arises from nothing and lapses into nothing; it is a 
nothing. Science knows that every motion is the new 
form of some other mode. But will science admit that 
all motion is correlated, active co-operation ; that prima- 
rily motion is change in the forms of real but active ex- 
tensions ; and that change of place arises secondarily, and 
is a resultant of secondary correlations ? Fig. 1 may illus- 
trate in what way motion can be simply change of form 
in time and space, and a return upon itself. 

Motion originated wholly within the ultimate particle 
of matter can arise only in correlation with other changes 
within the same ultimate particle. These correlated mod- 
ifications are so jointly dependent that under all conditions 
even their slightest modes vary in exact correspondence 
— each a ratio of the other. All modifications resulting 
from inter-atomic copartnerships, if begun in any part of 
the primary atom, must directly modify the immediate 
correlates, and compel some corresponding adjustment in 



5o 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 



more remotely connected parts. In this way all motion, 
each point energizing for itself, is yet constrained, directed, 
modified — in brief, limited and conditioned in the manner 
of its changes by its correlatives. 

It follows that all motion is co-operation. Every phase 
of motion must be regarded in two aspects — that of action 

FIGS. 1-7 — DIAGRAMS OF RHYTHMIC ATOMS. 




FIG. I. 

Rhythmic atom midway in vibratory elongations and retraction. The 
arrows show the directions of wave-fronts. At return beats all directions 
are reversed. The figure illustrates supposed relations and movements in 
continued equilibrium. It does not assume to represent the actual motion- 
form of atoms. 

and that of reaction — the two phases blending, often 
indistinguishably, in one process. Also every phase of 
motion has many correlates, more and less remote in their 
influence. The total of motion is thus a complex of 
correlated changes jointly conditioned in space and time. 



WHAT IS MOTION? 5 I 

All bodies, all physical phenomena, also arise in and 
through established active correlations. Inorganic and 
organic substances, as we know them, are the products of 
various inter-atomic co-operation. Every visible body is 
held, in its partial separateness and temporary individual- 
ity, by internal co-operations ; and its commerce with other 
bodies not itself is rhythmic co-operation between some 
of its not visible energetic vibrators and those of its 
responsive neighbors. Solids are largely groups of 
tensions, but all of them with much retained rhythmic 
action. 

But there never is, there never can be, continuous 
equality of modes in action and reaction ; else the op- 
posed equal forces would produce rest, not motion. 
Motion is modification, and is never identical with its own 
present mode at any two consecutive moments ; it is 
never converted into anything except other motion. 
Action and reaction are equal and opposed in each 
vibration as a whole ; but they are not equal in dynamic 
force at each moment of any vibration, or of any larger 
co-operation. From the structure, the innate constitution, 
of motion, there is a continuous transformation of free 
motion into tension or of tension into free motion. This 
is currently admitted to be the continuous process in all 
harmonic motion ; the rhythmic theory enlarges the 
statement by insisting that all motion, properly inter- 
preted, is harmonic motion. 

Each vibration is vibratory because of the continuous 
transformation from vis viva to potential force and back 
from potential force to vis viva, in an endless cycle ; then 
the compounding of two such harmonic cycles can only 
add more variety of modes to the compounded rhythm. 
Combining compound rhythms with other compound 
rhythms in many ways can only produce more and more 
numerous new modifications of rhythmic pulsation. If 
such pulsations cannot adjust themselves each to the 



52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

other, they will not become compounded ; or, if they are 
but poorly adjusted, they will soon fall asunder and be- 
come dissociated, as the less stable compounds are con- 
tinually doing under the influence of outside helps and 
interferences. 

As two drops of water brought together must unite, 
each taking a somewhat changed form and place, but 
neither trenching upon the real extension of the other, so 
any two adapted motions must unite and become in effect 
but one co-operation, yet each, though changed in form, 
remains and acts entirely in and of itself. 

The theory in no sense abolishes form and size of very 
literal shapes and dimensions. On the contrary, every- 
thing has at every moment a real configuration of its own, 
of actual and unvarying dimensions, but the figure is 
never for any two consecutive instants exactly the same, 
because the figure is constantly re-created by, is made by 
an energetic process of change, of motion. As every 
motion must have direction, so there must be an actual 
space through which it moves, and this space must be of 
three dimensions — not only a length, but a breadth and a 
thickness. Then, as the motion is indestructible, go where 
it will, it carries its dimensions with itself, and it is only 
modified in form by the co-operation with some other 
equally active energy. 

Is it claimed that where there is motion something is 
moved ? We answer, certainly. Power, energy, is moved. 
Power is brought into special co-operative modes of exer- 
cise. The power is not conditioned, but the methods of its 
use are conditioned in their forms and other modes of 
change. It is impossible to destroy form and its actual 
dimensions, as it is impossible to destroy the directed and 
correlated motion which constitutes the extension, and 
some form which it must take at each moment. Form is 
the abstract, as space is an abstract of extension in general. 
' Visible forms are the spaces which apparently contain, 



WHAT IS MOTION? 53 

which comprehend and include, not only the actual exten- 
sions at any given moment, but the accompanying spaces 
into which the vibratory motion penetrates with its suc- 
cession of changes, and any other outlying spaces which 
are but interstices into which other adapted substances 
might penetrate, and into which they demonstrably some- 
times do penetrate. It follows that form, in its objective 
point of view, is motion in active co-operation in a space 
which it apparently pre-empts and fills — partly as still 
energetic tensions, and in part as motion free to enter into 
other copartnerships — as with light, heat, and in some 
way indirectly with our own powers of perceiving. 

The same misapprehension arises as to the full nature 
of forms and substances, as we have seen to exist in regard 
to motion of the apparent solid, or of any so-called " visi- 
ble body." The form actual at one instant is " eked out " 
by the actual unlike forms produced by the motion at 
other moments. Thus the entire space in which these 
motions are in active correlated vibration seems to be 
a plenum, and entirely full of a visibly continuous 
substance. 

Again, this appearance is not a falsity ; it is only a too 
hasty conclusion, an untested assumption, which a wider 
knowledge will interpret far more comprehensively than 
the senses can interpret it ; but which, upon the plane of 
the senses alone, is as true to-day to the highest authority 
in science as it is to the child who is sure that he both 
sees and feels, the solid form. He does see and touch 
something which is practically a continuity of solid form, 
of solid resistance. The child is justified in his clear and 
positive judgments. Nevertheless, with more light as to 
the internal structure of substances, his judgments must 
become so enlarged and modified, little wonder that with 
insufficient glimmers of a certainty of misjudgments, as 
judged by a wider knowledge, there arises the appalling 
dread, almost the certainty, that phenomenal Nature is all 



54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

a bitter delusion, or at best nothing better than a beautiful 
and transient phantasmagoria. 

But wider knowledge may prove that Nature is no- 
where a cheat, yet is nowhere fully comprehended. It 
may prove that her facts are nowhere even distorted, 
requiring to be transfigured in the too narrow perceptions 
and judgments of her intelligent children. We are all 
groping onward together in a common twilight. We are 
in the doubtful twilight, but the morning twilight which 
grows penetratingly is herald of an ever more and more 
perfect day. And the visible form remains as truly 
a reality to-day as formerly — only it must be differently 
explained. 

When this form is visibly moved onward, the tensions 
are doubtless sent forward together, often without sepa- 
ration ; but that this is accomplished without internal reac- 
tions, changes of parts, is impracticable and not to be for 
a moment accepted by one who believes that all physical 
action is some mode of motion, and all motion some mode 
of a dependent co-operation in space and time, which 
involves, and in the nature of the case must involve, 
changes in forms and rates. How can any two ever- 
changing extensions be brought forcibly enough together 
to mutually push each other out of place without both 
becoming modified as to their preceding changes? Is it 
not evident that the ongoing of the one — the body moved, 
to which we give most attention — is a secondary result, a 
secondary mode of motion which, soon or late, must 
become re-transformed into primary rhythmic vibration ? 

Let us think of primary motion, then, as an endless 
intra-atomic changing in form, hence in rates of change. 
And because one motion is forever coming in contact with 
and so interfering with other motions, let us think of the 
compounded product as endless complex modifications of 
changes in forms and rates of change. Let us think of 
visible motion as a secondary product resulting from the 



WHAT IS MOTION? 55 

co-operations of the primary motions. And let us think 
of all motion as the interaction of the parts of the co- 
operative system, never as the translation of the system 
as a whole. Thus, all motion being the internal manifes- 
tations of its special motion system, all of the properties 
of every substance must be thought of as pure motions, 
which, in co-operation with our sensations, produce in us 
all sensible phenomena. 

That the subject may not seem too complicated to be 
realized, we propose to treat it in sections and in detail, and 
will only add here that no two or many motions can be 
brought into collision without in some way modifying 
each other. They must co-act for a longer or a shorter 
time, because they are kindred energies, and both unlim- 
itedly changeable through co-operation. 




THE RHYTHMIC ATOM. 

In the discussion of motion in general it seemed almost 
a necessity to refer frequently to the supposed unit of 
motion, the Rhythmic Atom ; and in treating more 
especially of the atom there must be return to the dis- 
cussion of principles already considered. The resulting 
repetitions are presented, however, in slightly varied 
aspects and may point towards new bearings of a com- 
plicated subject that in the manner of presentation is 
unfamiliar and hence must contend with many preposes- 
sions. Such repetitions may not be wholly undesirable. 

The reason for dealing so minutely and so much at 
length with the hypothetic atom itself, is because to gain 
a clear conception of its supposed methods when vibrat- 
ing in isolation, will enable one the better to comprehend 
the supposed methods of combinations in the formation 
of substances, chemical and physical, and the explanation 
of all the other physical processes, as radiation, electrical 
phenomena, gravitation, etc. 

With our modes of interpreting data, every differentia- 
tion in material co-operations of any and of all kinds is 
made wholly dependent upon the amount and the kind 
of association, not between the atoms as wholes, but 
between those semi-detached parts of the atoms which 
we have termed the atomic vibrators. Motion is co- 
operation of parts — not directly of wholes, — though these 
also become more and less remotely involved, and hence 

56 



THE RHYTHMIC ATOM. 57 

modified in varying degrees. Even the translated body, 
for the time, is virtually in combination with the larger 
whole, which includes both its motion and the cause, 
force, or other motion which is the temporary correlative 
of its movements. 

Where the beginnings are comparatively simple, the 
results may be extremely complex and far-reaching. But 
the beginnings of all physical processes are held to be 
invariably co-operations among the vibrators, and when- 
ever energies — special modes of motion — are transmitted 
from place to place, the free and the measurably free 
vibrators are the common carriers. Hence the import- 
ance at the outset of thoroughly comprehending these 
A B C's of changes, without which not only the rhythmic 
atom itself would be meaningless, but the entire hypo- 
thetic structure of the Philosophy of Individuality would 
be of no account. 

But the vibrators are of no account except as, however 
imperfectly, they indicate primary correlated terms, point- 
ing towards the directed groups of motions which 
severally condition each other in one system, and to- 
gether constitute the equilibrated complex atomic rhythm 
of indivisible motion, the ultimate atom. This is the 
least system of persisting motion, and it enters as the 
stable brick into every substance ; but, like more pliable 
material, assumes innumerable shapes and can serve with 
an infinite variety of helpfulness, aided by its associates. 

Thus, though our represented atom is only a rough at- 
tempt at suggesting to the eye some primary possible 
co-operations which may be presumed to lie at the base 
of physical nature, yet the theory of conditioned co-oper- 
ation itself being fact and not fancy, the hypothecated 
individual may be an important aid in enabling us to 
comprehend the real individual, as well as to gain some 
rational conception of the structure of the larger masses 
which are somehow composed of working aggregates of 



58 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

those individualized if infinitesimal relative beings — the 
ultimate units of matter. 

Our rhythmic atom then is a relative whole composed 
of inseparable because of jointly conditioned vibrating 
parts which always, under all contingencies, maintain an 
internal complex equilibrium of atomic motions. In 
combination with other atoms — where motions have 
taken in part the form of tensions and an equivalent 
amount of free motion has been distributed elsewhere — 
the atomic equipoise, like that between atom and atom, 
may be rather static than dynamic. Translation of the 
atomic system as a whole is no part of its normal inter- 
nal rhythm. 

The least element of motion known to science is a 
Wave-length of light. This Wave-length is shown to be a 
product of correlation by a reversal of process — the two 
halves of the Wave seeming to be exact opposites. These 
are transverse Wavelets, acting across the line of propaga- 
tion. The transmitted ray of light is thus shown to be 
very highly complex. It may even be subdivided up to 
the limits of sensible experiment. 

With visible Wave-lengths as teachers, we infer that 
active correlation must govern every part of every ulti- 
mate atom — the same laws of correlation governing large 
and small. All harmonic motions are produced by oppo- 
sitely directed energizing, by counter forces simultaneously 
impelling in opposed directions. All rhythmic action 
means regulated action and reaction. Simultaneous 
changes of modes or of directions may arise in any cor- 
related parts provided the system's joint static and 
dynamic equipoise is correspondingly readjusted and 
remains continuously unbroken. 

So accurately is co-operation, intra-atomic and inter- 
atomic, adapted in time and space, that energy is held to 
be radiated and transmitted through space by travelling 
alternately with elongating and retracting vibrators — the 



THE RHYTHMIC ATOM. 59 

ether's helping and connecting atomic lines of active 
vibration in which tension seems to be at its minimun. 

Visible spectral lines cannot represent single vibrations ; 
if they did, a single atom of a substance might present its 
characteristic spectrum. The wave-length must be regarded 
as a. group of transverse vibrations occupying their several 
denned amounts of extension, each in its own relative 
place. 

The limitations and reversals of motion in a wave-length 
of light make the theory of an equilibrated multiple rhyth- 
mic or harmonic activity — co-operative about a common 
atomic centre — both comprehensible and justifiable as an 
atomic hypothesis. 

Under like conditions, all radiated energy travels at 
about a common rate. This fact can be best explained 
by assuming that, in the direction of propagation, the 
energy is transmitted from one vibrator to another — mov- 
ing on alternately towards and from each atomic centre, 
through which it is passed by the assistance of the normal 
vibratory action. 

Atomic vibrations are assumed to have, like the ether, 
both direct and transverse wave-lengths. These vary in 
form with the co-operative conditions. They are also 
held to be to-and-fro motions of parts of a system ; but 
more analogous to fluid waves than to the swing of a pen- 
dulum — wave fronts of pure motion surging from the 
atomic centre to its outer bounds, then, reversed in direc- 
tion, surging back again — impelled and directed at all 
stages by constitutional correlations. 

The central or pivotal point of such a system of cor- 
related changes, though it must be spoken of as relatively 
at rest, is by no means a point of indifference. It is 
rather the node at which all motions are alternately 
directed, at which they meet, and from which they are 
redistributed — probably not always in the same manner 
or the same lines. As the atomic proportion of free 



60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

motion to tension is highly variable and dependent upon 
external co-operations, its internal methods must vary 
accordingly — although the internal correlativities must 
be maintained and the rhythmic balance always in active 
operation. 

But as variable amounts of free motion may be received 
and transmitted, the differenced internal modifications are 
also probable. The atomic centre of rest, of gravitation, 
is a true resultant, precisely as it is in all larger systems ; 
from a simple molecule to a solar-system and probably to 
the total physical universe. The old modes of the meet- 
ing energies are interfered with by each other; their 
equally opposed action momentarily becomes tension, 
then is freely redistributed elsewhere — always in accord- 
ance with rigid mechanical law. 

The rest is not a cessation from activity, but from ac- 
tual movement. It is the movelessness of well-matched 
wrestlers, who, straining every sinew, might yet be taken 
at some instant by a flash-camera in the poise of a move- 
less statue. It is cessation like that of the darkness which 
attends the meeting of adapted and opposed waves of 
light. The nodes in all kinds of vibratory processes, as 
in those of vibrating strings, of reflected and concentrated 
light, heat, and sound, are held to be of this order of bal- 
anced, antagonized, but carefully adjusted and co-opera- 
tive energies. 

We shall find reason to infer later that the axes of 
growth in all vegetation, because they are positions of 
established equilibration, are also the points from which 
new growths take their rise. We shall find that such 
nodes, or places where motion is in temporary equilibrium, 
are supposed to play a much more important part in 
organic than in inorganic structures. 

The atomic axis is a centre of motion equipoise — not 
of a dead but of a living equilibration which ever renews 
the rhythm of re-adapted activities. Barely stated as yet, 



THE RHYTHMIC ATOM. 6 1 

the hypothesis of the rhythmic atom with its complex cor. 
relativity of parts may seem to be highly chimerical. It 
is only intended to be a most inadequate symbolic mode 
of suggesting related co-operations in the ultimate units 
of matter, of a kind which might evolve a universe like 
the existing one. 

The subject is so remote from every-day life and its 
methods, distinct ideas perhaps can be best conveyed in 
part through visible representations, 

A vibration of the kind indicated must be an elastic 
line of motion, continuous and indivisible, composed not 
of particles but perhaps of successive pulses, including 
transverse as well as forward motion — one stream of mo- 
tion composed of differentiated modes, making its way 
to and fro in a space of three dimensions. This stream 
must have length, width, and depth, infinitesimal as the 
whole is, and whatever its modifications in form, it can 
never vary its quantity. The infinitely small is not the 
impossible. The theory must be tested by its ability to 
explain phenomena of all kinds on one and the same 
principle of correlation. 

Suppose each recurring vibration to be something like 
the outflow and reversal of an electric current, except that 
an electric current flows through or along a foreign con- 
ductor, but atomic currents flow only through definite 
spaces in definite times, because, being internally composed 
of oppositely directed correlative impulses, their vibratory 
action arises wholly as ever-recurring modifications of the 
complex atomic whole. As already noted, any two meeting 
motions must establish a common centre of equilibrium 
or gravity. An atom of many correlated motions must 
also establish such a centre — its axis of motion, symmetry, 
and equilibrium — a neutral point around which the opposed 
motions oscillate. 

In the diagrams an atom is drawn with only four vibra- 
tory lines for the sake of simplicity, and because the 



62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

supposed correlations can be sufficiently illustrated by 
that number of vibrators. The transverse wavelets are 
not given. 

The dotted circle within which the figure of the hypo- 
thetic atom is represented is supposed to indicate the 
boundary to which vibration would elongate if normally 
caused by internal correlations alone. The dotted lines 
extending outside of the circle mark out a possible pro- 
longation of the vibrations in response to dynamic forces 
co-operating from without the atom. Any communicated 
energy, as heat, by overcoming the internal stress of a 
vibration and transforming it into active motion, may 
prolong the extension of the vibration indefinitely. Con- 
versely, anything which will increase the tension of a 
vibration must diminish its length, but only through a 
corresponding increase in breadth and thickness. The 
real dimensions of every primary vibration remain 
unchanged. 

Each vibration is supposed to be itself composed of 
oppositely directed changes ; the arrows show which way 
the wave-fronts of each portion of every vibration are 
supposed to face at the particular stage of the cycle of 
changes indicated. 

In Figs. 2, 3, 4, and 5, a straight-line rhythmic atom 
is represented as it would vibrate if isolated from all out- 
side co-operation. The dark lines, plain and broken, are 
supposed to govern the dominant direction of the com- 
plex action as a whole — the red lines heading the opposite 
way ; but all directions are simultaneously reversed during 
the return beat of the vibratory period. 

Thus a composition of several co-operative elements, 
facing in different ways, produces each of the four com- 
paratively distinct primary lines of recurrent rhythmic 
action. There is continuous to-and-fro motion along each 
line, which is called an atomic vibrator. The several 
vibrators in correlation constitute the indivisible atom. 



THE RHYTHMIC ATOM. 



63 



One elongation and one retraction constitute a vibratory 
period ; but two differentiated groups of vibrators, the A 
and the B groups, differ in period by a half beat. This 
difference arises from the nature of their respective corre- 







:B 



W 



X' Al <*«> +-+ 0.. . 

• ••«»••••••• • * * » • ♦ • # — — — ~ —-/v* 



ft 



•VK" — 



~» — — — — — « ••••••••?•■ ••• ••••* * 






i'B' 



FIG. 2. 

Rhythmic atom half-way in direct phases. 
m + = increasing elongation. 
m — = decreasing elongation. 
w° = reversal position. 

lations, adjusted in the interest of a perpetual moving 
equilibrium of the atomic system as a whole. 

Dotted lines point out the unoccupied paths at the 
moment represented, but along which the vibrators must 
move at some time during each complete vibratory cycle. 



6 4 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 



In Fig. 2 vibrators O A, A 1 are elongating, and 
vibrators O B, O B 1 are retracting — the action of the A 
group facing outwards and that of the B facing centre- 
wards. The two groups differ in phase by exactly a 
half beat — the condition represented being midway in both 
phases — when an atom of this type must have the form 

:Y 



X' A'-: 



• 
• 


syvc-i- 


.• 


• 


tt 


1 

* 


:* 


. 


4ri/ — «— 


— > "^ -* - - - - i 


i ......__—— 


___- 


• > 


±z 


• > 


-^ • 


• 


. 


li 


t 
1 


• 
• 
• 




• • 


o •• • 


• "•• • 


♦ ••• -• 


• 


•. 


• ••• - • 


• - 


• • . • • * 



\A X 



•B' 



FIG. 3. 

Rhythmic atom half-way in reverse phases. 

of a Greek cross — given both in Figs. 2 and 3. In Fig. 
3 the action is exactly the reverse of Fig. 2, the A group 
now facing centrewards and the B group elongating. In 
Fig. 4, O A and O A 1 are f elongated, but O B, O B l J 
retracted. The reverse of this stage would represent the 
longer lines as vertical and the shorter ones horizontal. 



THE RHYTHMIC ATOM. 



65 



In Fig. 5, O A, O A 1 are at normal elongation ; but O B, 
O B 1 are retracted and represented by curves meeting at 
the atomic axis. At this stage, when the reversal of all 
directions is to begin, the atom is, in form, little more 
than a threefold line of given length, breadth, and thick- 
ness. In reverse phases the line would be vertical. 



B 



rrrv - 



x' a' : --^v^ 



u 







I 

P 






ims — 



iB' 



: Y 

FIG. 4. 

Rhythmic atom. Horizontal vibrations two-thirds elongated ; perpendiculars 
two-thirds retracted. 

It appears that virtual symmetry is maintained in all 
possible phases ; and that the centre of gravity — that is, of 
equipoised energy — must remain unchanged during every 
stage of this cycle of harmonic changes. 

The configuration of any system of correlated motions 
which repeat themselves in rhythmic periods, must be a 



66 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 



perpetual rhythmic change of form. Outside co-opera- 
tions may greatly modify that form, but they cannot 
destroy the innate symmetry of figure unless they can 
destroy the inherent equipoise through which it arises. 
If attention is given to that aspect of the subject, it will 
appear that atoms everywhere work in a domain of virtual 

:Y 



•B 



tt:: 



0:: 



X' A'' ""'<'-*■ u 



ryyoo 



K^TI ^ 



:A ...X 



W" 



3 

:y' 

FIG. 5. 
Rhythmic atom. Horizontal vibrations elongated ; perpendiculars retracted. 

equipoise, and that every molecular centre of gravity 
is a centre of actual though not always of ostentatious 
symmetry. 

Figures 6 and 7 represent an atom whose vibrations 
move along curved paths. There is very considerable 
evidence that some atoms do have a normal vibratory 



THE RHYTHMIC ATOM. 67 

curvature ; and that in some modifications resulting from 
atomic co-operations the lines of force % naturally become 
curved and often tend to return upon themselves along 
curved paths, as in magnetic and electrical phenomena. 
To these varieties of composite curvature we shall return 
at a later stage of the discussion. 



•Y 



B. 




' :J3 

Y-- 

FIG. 6. 

Rhythmic atoms, with curved vibrations midway in direct phases. 

Here it is only needful to indicate that whether a 
system has curved or straight vibratory paths is of no 
importance, provided a balanced reciprocal action be 
maintained in every part, and the form of the atom will 
readily lend itself to inter-atomic combinations, to trans- 
lation, or to rotary motion about its own axis. 



68 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 



Vibration of any kind must imply tension at work in 
connection with vibratory motion. Primary vibrators 
were likened to the successive outflow and inflow of 
action from and towards a fixed point ; perhaps the 
motion as a whole would be best indicated by the alter- 
nate stretching and retracting of an extremely elastic sub- 



• Y 






' • rm° 




ft.--:* , 



Y-' 



• B 



FIG. 7. 

Rhythmic atom, with curved vibrations. One group elongated, the other 

retracted. 

stance. A piece of caoutchouc, so formed that when its 
horizontal arms are stretched its vertical arms must 
retract, and vice versa, would be a not bad model of the 
Greek-cross atom ; but with the vital difference — that the 
model must always be stretched, elongated, from with- 
out, while all atomic vibrators elongate and retract from 



THE RHYTHMIC ATOM. 6g 

within — each phase impelling and compelling its correla- 
tives and together maintaining the endless co-operation of 
tense inherent energizing. 

But if oppositely directed motions are made to hinder 
each other's progress by producing commensurate tension, 
there must be lateral interference. We may postulate 
pulses of opposed directions so adjusted in form, place 
and time as to become recurring mutual co-operative 
checks. Such lines of flow might produce, by their com- 
plex opposition, rotary movements repeated in transverse 
wavelets along the greater wave of elongation and 
retraction — lateral action comparable to the swaying 
action running along a tense vibrating chord. The tense- 
ness and the chord also fairly represent an elongated 
vibration. 

Whatever the lateral mode may be, interference there 
must be of some kind where free motion becomes trans- 
formed into tension. 

But the differenced vibrators of the system should also 
be interdependent. Motion along the red line of O A, in 
the several diagrams, is supposed to continue along the 
red line of O B ; that in the solid dark lines of O A, into 
corresponding dark lines of O B — all without radical 
change of direction. In a parallel way, the directed 
motion in the red lines of O A 1 continues along the red 
lines of O B 1 ; and that in the dark lines of O A 1 along dark 
lines of O B 1 . Travelling energy may also flow from one 
homologous vibrator to another of an opposite phase. Thus 
A and B vibrators are complernentaries, and in some aspects 
are but the two halves of one harmonic motion, whose 
length, under normal conditions, is the distance from the 
centre of the atom to its circumference. 

But the motions in the homologous broken lines, repre- 
sented in retraction by the small semicircular curves, are 
supposed under some conditions to clash at the atomic 
centre like oppositely directed wave-crests, mutually re- 



yo THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

pelling each other at the instant in which all the vibrations 
are reversed in direction — thus adding their impetus to 
the reversal. 

In each elongating vibration the dynamic energy is 
being continually transformed into tension, with its result- 
ing rigidity, through the mutual hindrance to motion 
produced by the interference of oppositely directed 
energies in the different elements of the same vibrator, 
until, at the moment of general reversal, the " dynamic " 
and the " static " modes are in exact balance, and reversal 
begins by the help of other correlated factors. Tension 
being the check and stress produced by motions opposing 
each other in direction, these antagonized forces, like 
equally pitted wrestlers, hold each other in the mutual 
strain of apparent rest but of real unabated action. 
Their influence upon outside forces, unless in the guise 
of inertia, resistance to release, and gravitative pull, is 
little more than zero. 

All harmonic motion, as before stated, necessitates the 
conversion of dynamic into static — the tension-producing 
— modes of force ; or of the static modes into the dy- 
namic, in unending repetition. Persisting tensions, which 
arise from the compounding of oppositely directed united 
vibrations (chemical combinations), are complex strains 
in which motion is about equally impeded in both elonga- 
tions and retractions. Presumably motion is not entirely 
arrested, but so much hindered and modified that to out- 
side co-operations it seems little more than a passive iner- 
tia. Tensions are " potential forces " ; their conversion 
into released motion is potential force becoming again 
dynamic. Both modes are purely motion ; but to avoid 
circumlocution the most interfering modes are designated 
tensions, and the less interfering motions or free motions. 
Neither is wholly bound and neither wholly free. The 
terms only express different degrees of freedom. 

In the elongation of a primary vibration, the farther 



THE RHYTHMIC ATOM. J I 

the wave-front moves onward from the atomic centre, the 
less will be the ratio of the free motion to the tension ; 
the less dynamic action, as a push or a blow, can it exert 
upon any outside object. On the contrary, in the retrac- 
tion of a primary vibration towards its atomic centre, the 
quantity of free motion increases at the same rate at 
which it diminished during the outflow. 

In this momentous structural, universal fact of the 
alternate conversion of vis viva into vis inertia and of vis 
inertia into vis viva in every primary vibration of the 
ultimate atoms, and hence also in every compound struc- 
ture, we find the key to all co-operative modes with their 
marvellously differenced results. With this key we should 
be able to unlock all processes, even the most complicated. 

Action and reaction accompanied by movement in 
either term, in the nature of the case, cannot be accu- 
rately equal in modes at any instant. If precisely equal 
at any point in space, of necessity actual motion would 
be suspended, and here would be an instance of absolute 
rest. It is because in all co-operations whatever, motion 
and tension are being constantly transformed the one into 
the other that action and reaction are equal and opposed 
only when we add together both the motion and the ten- 
sion and consider the sum of these two modes of the one 
equal the sum of the two modes of the other. In that 
sense they are always in exact balance. 

But the free motion between action and reaction must 
be continuously unequal except when, the co-operation 
being rhythmic in kind, at the instant of reversal both the 
opposed motions and the opposed tensions should be in 
exact balance ; hence the need of other correlations to 
prevent the deadlock of absolute rest. This is as true in 
the mass as in the atom. 

It follows that, in vibratory elongations, the free motion 
at any given position must be in an inverse ratio to some 
power of the distance from the atomic axis. This funda- 



J 2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

mental structural necessity must be universal, admitting 
of no exceptions under any circumstances. Whether the 
action and the reaction arise within one complex vibration 
or arise within any compound system whatever, the same 
law of inverse distance from the common centre of 
gravity must be continuously operative. 

A heavy pendulum will give a decided push to any ob- 
stacle when just past its lowest point of vibration. At its 
outer limit it can give no push whatever, and at every 
point between, its motive force must be estimated accord- 
ing to the law of inverse distance from its centre of 
motion. This centre is a fulcrum constituted by opposed 
motions, the point from which they mutually help each 
other both to approach and to recede. In the rhythmic 
atom this fulcrum is stable, because the motions and ten- 
sions upon all sides are kept in perfect balance through 
perpetual readjustment between the static and the dy- 
namic modes. Every motion in this way finds its point 
of application in its neighbor, from which point it can 
push on towards its own goal, while in the same act its 
neighbor is oppositely impelled — both through this double- 
phased relativity helping and being helped unceasingly 
during the entire course of every process. 

Our Greek-cross atom, with its homologous arms elon- 
gating during the half period in which the other pair 
retract, and retracting as they elongate, in ceaseless 
rhythm, may seem a too complicated device to be the 
ultimate unit of motion. Perhaps a less complex unit 
may be possible — a single line of oppositely directed mo- 
tions with their rhythmic transformations of free motions 
into tension and tension into free motion. The existence 
or non-existence of this simpler atom has no actual impor- 
tance as bearing upon the constitutional correlativity of 
the actual ultimate, constituted by two ultimate terms 
whose destruction must mean destruction of the relative 
and return to the undifferentiated absolute. 



THE RHYTHMIC ATOM. 73 

Is it asked : What gain is expected to arise in particular 
from an atom of rhythmic internal motion ? 

It has all the advantages in the explanation of phenom- 
ena which either the elastic solid atom or the unextended 
dynamic atom or the vortex-motion atom possesses over 
each of the others. Added to this, it can credibly account 
for many hitherto unexplained phenomena. Given per- 
sisting systems of efficient co-operations, whose related 
motions and extensions are fixed and invariable in quan- 
tities, but unlimitedly variable in modes arising from 
orderly outside co-operations — all changes produced by 
exact correlations in time and space — could a universe as 
widely differentiated as this one fail to be duly evolved ? 

Briefly, then, ultimate atoms of correlated internal 
motion, such as have been roughly indicated, can be made 
to interpret the most widely differentiated phenomena, 
all of them alike the results of purely mechanical inter- 
atomic co-operations. Tensions can be shown to arise from 
oppositely directed, mutually inhibitory motions, and 
tension, as we use the term, is very nearly synonymous 
with the ordinary term — matter. It is tensions alone 
which become visible, which form the sensible bodies 
with their felt, so-called passive, resistances. It is the 
translation of tensions and their visible motions that has 
originated the current conception of motion, which is 
that of a something moved on in space by outside force ; 
but such motion is as much a product of correlated action 
as any other. The product of mass into motion is an 
available measure of energy ; but attention has been less 
directed to the initiative cause than to the reacting effect, 
the body visibly cleaving its appointed way onward. 
While the two co-acting terms are in contact the mutual 
action between them is the virtual co-operation between 
parts of one and the same system. After they have 
separated, each is still surrounded by a medium with 
which it continues in close co-operation. The results to 



74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

the moving body are friction and consequent retardation 
and the downward pull of gravitation. But the body 
itself, being a complex of tensions, it seems inevitable 
that there must always be, in addition, an internal ten- 
dency to transform the translatory motion into a greater 
molecular freedom, into decreased tension and increased 
internal motion. If the translation is arrested by col- 
lision, there is immediate conversion into heat. With no 
collision, with no outside friction, if such a condition 
could obtain, who can prove that any compound sub- 
stance would continue to move onward without finally 
becoming dissociated through the gradual conversion of 
the translatory motion into greater molecular dynamic 
action ? There are many facts and analogies leading to 
the conclusion that there is always an organic tendency to 
reconvert all molar motion into its primary dynamic 
elements. 

The conception of an unrelated motion, such as that of 
a body flying alone through void space, is untenable if all 
modes of motion both begin and end in correlation, with 
its double-sidedness of continuous action. Translatory 
motion, therefore, can only be a temporary mode ; we may 
almost affirm it to be an abnormal type of motion, and it 
certainly is not at all the one typical affection of matter 
which it is so generally held to be. The place of visible 
motion in the kingdom of dynamics must be immensely 
secondary in the total sum of practical results. No uni- 
verse could exist in which there was any tendency to an 
unrelated ongoing in space ; and since the world does 
hold together, the motion of its primary elements 
presumably must be motion that returns upon itself, be- 
cause held always within bounds by correlated motion. 

But the tensions which lock each other into general 
practical inaction are yet in active communication of some 
kind with their environment. They absorb, transmit, or 
reflect light and heat ; they act chemically upon their 



THE RHYTHMIC ATOM. 75 

surfaces ; if not conductors they may receive the surface- 
charge of electricity, and in many other ways there are 
evidences of active surface co-operation with the environ- 
ment ; it is believed that a trailing residue of energy is 
left slightly behind when they are in rapid motion ; this 
has been accounted for as the ether adhering to the denser 
substance. This " bound ether " and a free ether have 
been generally called in to mediate between all sensible 
masses, to produce electrical phenomena, and even to do 
service as electricity itself. The denser particles have 
been enveloped in it in the guise of special and private 
atmospheres ; ether cushions, serving to prevent the col- 
lision of the harder solids and to regulate repulsions and 
attractions of atoms, molecules, and larger masses. 

There has been an invisible field of force of some kind 
hypothetically thrown around more solid matter in every 
attempt at an explanation of the working methods of 
Nature. The obvious facts have always required this, 
and they still continue to require it. 

The rhythmic atom, with its outreaching vibrators, a 
portion of which may become condensed into tensions 
with dissipation of free motion, but other portions of 
which remain uncombined, out-raying freely and forcibly 
from the visible surfaces, though themselves invisible ; 
and pulsing to and fro like active cilia, surrounding every 
compound particle with a fringe of energy, which is yet a 
literal part and parcel of itself, is another method of 
interpreting co-operation between tensions whose own 
energizing is exerted in a condition of tense mutual 
strain, alternating in reversed directions, and so little 
recognized by the senses that we constantly think and 
speak of all solid masses as passive, inert, as something 
not active, but to be acted upon. 

But the outlying, still comparatively free surface vibra- 
tors, which produce the thickening upon all fluids called 
the surface " skin," and which weave a corresponding 



7 6 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 



thickening upon all surfaces which are not disintegrating 
and which so variously co-operate with the surrounding 
medium, have the important advantage of being legitimate 
portions of the rhythmic particles themselves. They are 
also in an active, intimate correlation among themselves 
and with the tensions to which they inseparably pertain. 
No foreign intervention, with such an hypothesis, is need- 
ful or desirable. 




MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 

If we assume, as we do, that matter is literally com- 
posed of aggregated and co-operative modes of motion, 
of course we are bound to indicate distinctly in what sev- 
eral ways these motions are supposed to come together 
and to mutually modify each other to such an extent that 
they become the familiar fluids and solids of our acquaint- 
ance. The present chapter is an attempt to point out 
the various probable methods of atomic and molecular 
interaction. 

If isolated single lines of correlated motion could co- 
operate and persist independent of each other ; yet, pro- 
vided their central axes were brought together, they 
might unite in one and the same line, or if acting at right 
angles, form the Greek-cross atom or some of its possible 
modifications. Uniting in the same way, several Greek- 
cross atoms would, unless separated from without, co-op- 
erate thereafter, vibrating in different planes. 

It is needful to insist only upon the working correlation 
of all motion and some form of co-operation whenever 
two or more motions come in contact. Several atoms 
might become one group of many vibrations beating 
in and out from the same centre of gravity. They 
could vibrate in all planes and directions possible in a 
space of three dimensions, so long as among them they 
continuously maintained the system's moving equipoise. 

The question whether in a physical point of view the 
so-called chemical elements are or are not ultimate atoms, 

77 



78 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

need not concern the present inquiry. Hypothetically 
they are all constituted in accordance with the rhythmic 
principle of correlated motions, in which tensions and free 
motions are forever being converted each into the other 
in an unending rhythm of harmonic changes. Obviously 
much differentiated in details, the vibratory processes of 
each class seem only to require certain distinct portions of 
a three-dimension space, and the different elements do not 
take possession of the same portions, so that any area 
may be filled over and over with different elements, each 
finding as much room for its legitimate pulsations as 
though its kind were the sole and only occupants. These 
facts accord well with the rhythmic hypothesis. 

The apparently indivisible particles with which chemists 
concern themselves are practically permanent units. By 
the hypothesis each system is composed of semi-detached 
vibrators — probably differing among themselves in modes 
of elongation with accompanying transverse oscillations ; 
differing in periods and rates of movement, and in degrees 
of mutually dependent correlativity. Every system, 
under like conditions, is sensibly like all of its own 
class. Every system is constituted one system by its 
internal correlations. These correlatives are either ulti- 
mate and indivisible, or they continue in co-operation 
while they are subjected to only such contingencies as 
science at present can modify and control. 

Given these rhythmic units, each a group of pulsating 
lines of force, along each of whose paths dynamic and 
potential modes forever undergo ultimate transformations, 
can existing Nature be fairly shown to have probably 
arisen as the product of variously modified copartnerships 
among such abiding systems ? 

Atoms of this character are Faraday's centres of force 
with added and active determinate extensiveness — a con- 
stant which decides the actually occupied amount of 
atomic space whatever the temporary configuration. The 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 79 

apparent space appropriated depends largely upon the 
ratio of the static to the dynamic modes. The centre 
and its force is a constant. 

All physical changes are concerned with form and mo- 
mentum, but there are innumerable varieties of modifica- 
tions. The normal rhythm of vibrators has been largely 
converted into tensions with their apparent rigidity of 
mass, producing solids, and, where the tensions are less in 
proportion, liquids. These tensions arise through mutual 
active interference, generally between oppositely directed 
energies. Vibrators of the same class, but pertaining to 
different systems, tend to elongate towards each other 
along the same paths, hence the end-to-end clash of 
homologous gaseous elements with their resulting repul- 
sions. But the same or other like vibrators meeting side 
to side must draw their atomic centres towards each 
other, hence the phenomena of so-called attractions. The 
possible unlike results are endless. 

End-to-end collisions between but partly elongated 
vibrators would be more forceful than collisions between 
the same vibrators when they have nearly or quite com- 
pleted their outgoing phases. Hence the crowding of 
like particles would correspondingly increase their ap- 
parent repulsion — in other words, would determine the 
laws of pressure upon the sides of the containing vessel. 
Or, if a free outlet be afforded for the translation of par- 
ticles, they are pushed out into surrounding space with a 
force and at a rate of progression proportionate to the 
crowding of like particles within. If nothing can trans- 
late itself, it must be helped, as we are helped in walking 
or in jumping from a spring-board ; every action must 
have its fulcrum of reaction. 

That diffusion of gases proceeds at slower rates than 
would result without interferences is well known. Smooth, 
rounded solids could but little retard or speed each other ; 
harmonic vibrations, with their inherent energy but inevi- 



8o THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

table entanglements, explain the actual facts more simply 
and more clearly than can be done by any scheme of 
inert particles and alien atmospheres of active energies, 
or any scheme involving the impossible self-translation of 
atoms and molecules. 

Ultimate differentiated systems of inseparable harmonic 
vibrations, restricted to their own vibratory paths in re- 
lated equilibrium, because in all phases and under all 
modifications mathematically balancing each other around 
their fulcrum of motion, enable unlike particles, simple or 
compound, having different lines of motion, to take unoc- 
cupied places in the unfilled space which must be to them 
as a vacuum. Other related lines of tension and motion 
may thus establish themselves in a limited space, each 
equal network of vibrations exerting an equal pressure 
upon the sides of the containing vessel. 

The law of equal pressure from every gas which fills its 
adapted portion of space indicates that the mutual push, 
the free motion or dynamic energy of each, under like con- 
ditions, remains the same in quantity whether the gas be 
a simple or a compound substance. The compound in 
some way establishes a new tension in which the uniting 
motions engage, helping to neutralize each other so far as 
energetic outside co-operation is concerned. But the 
newly formed tensions seem to become a dead weight, an 
actual weight or resistance to be carried about by the 
correlated free motion. Whatever outside co-operations 
they may have, are in the nature of tensions to be over- 
come — not of free motion whose function is to overcome ; 
to move, not to remain. 

It follows that the free vibrations of all gaseous sub- 
stances, other things equal, have equal vibratory elonga- 
tions with equal repulsive force at like distances from their 
respective centres of gravity ; hence an equal number of 
molecules of all substances having the gaseous form can 
find room, under equal conditions, in any square inch of 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 8 1 

space. And the rates at which the various gases diffuse 
themselves are precisely the rates at which equal amounts 
of free motion can engineer their unequal amounts of 
weight — that is, of tension with its established internal 
and external co-operations. 

But by what methods may tension be supposed to 
result from compounded, oppositely directed motions ? 
In all atoms alternate vibrations being supposed to differ 
by a half beat — all homologous vibrators elongating during 
the half period in which their complementaries retract, — 
it becomes evident that any two atoms constructed on 
this plan could unite to form one molecule by either of 
two modes — by the union of two homologous vibrators, 
or by the union of any vibrator with its complementary. 

Still more important must be the consideration as to 
whether the combined elements move simultaneously in 
the same or in opposite directions. As both are vibratory 
energies with complex factors, unequal in kind and 
amounts, two vibratory lines may unite either along their 
whole length or only partially at or near their extremities, 
and combinations generally alike may give very different 
results. 

Whether the combining vibrators are homologous, or 
complementaries, can be of but little moment. The im- 
portant point is : Do their wave-fronts move in the same or 
in opposite directions ? If they move together, free motion 
may increase and cannot greatly diminish ; if not, tension 
must be the result. Much depends also upon the manner 
of their union. To become compound or to combine 
operations, means nothing more nor less than to enter 
into vibratory co-operation — sometimes in a common 
direction of activities, sometimes in opposed directions ; 
sometimes with and sometimes without mutual changes of 
vibratory paths ; sometimes with increase of tensions and 
dissipation of free motion, sometimes with an increase 
of free motion and the lessening of tensions. 



82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

The two co-operative methods are distinctly opposed 
and contrasted, viz.: 

(a) The method in which the wave-fronts of the uniting 
vibrators move simultaneously in the same directions. 

(b) The method in which the wave-fronts of the uniting 
vibrators move simultaneously in opposed directions. 

In the (a) compounds, of which there are several 
possible varieties, the result in general is an increased (and 
in no case of this class is it more than a slightly 
diminished), proportion of the dynamic to the static modes 
over the normal — the sum of the two being under all 
conditions an unvarying quantity. 

In the (b) compounds (which may vary as to amounts 
by which they unite with different partners and under 
different conditions, but apparently not as to typical 
method of compounding), the result in general, if not 
universally, is an increased proportion of the static to the 
dynamic modes over the normal. The two ways of com- 
pounding are often associated in the same mass, and they 
are both held to be aggregative or mass-forming. 

There are other modes of co-operation which tend 
to dissociation ; as when oppositely directed wavelets 
(direct or transverse) meet face to face — meet " end on " 
— when coming from opposed or partially opposed direc- 
tions. In all such cases there is a necessary rebound or 
repulsion. The supposition is that all repulsions of all 
kinds are mechanical effects produced by this class of end- 
to-end collisions between opposed vibrations. 

The stress which arises in all co-operation can be best 
explained as action and reaction between the variously 
directed rhythms of the vibratory parts of the systems, 
simple and compound. No intervening medium is 
required ; and if phenomena can be equally well or better 
explained without the hypothesis of a disconnected helping 
fluid, the interstellar ether may then take its place and 
do its own work as an atomic structure, fundamentally 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 83 

constituted through correlations, essentially of the same 
type as those of more dense matter with its greater 
accumulation of tensions and equivalent loss of active 
mobility. 

Oppositely directed energies, when brought into contact, 
produce tension either temporary or permanent. In the 
nature of the case, each active opposing motion (repre- 
senting a real extension) tending to arrest the other in its 
ongoing action, there will arise mutual crowding back, 
with condensation along that line ; then, with the reversal 
of the vibrations, each pushing against the other, they 
will be driven apart or mutually repelled if the contact 
has been of a kind which will enable them to freely 
separate. Thus colliding sensible bodies, having non- 
sensible free vibrators which alternately elongate and 
retract, — the visible surfaces being their axes of movement 
— after the first compression, have an elastic or restitution 
force in the normal reversal of rhythmic phases. 

(&) But if oppositely directed vibrations are brought 
together side to side during the elongation or partial elon- 
gation of each, with such adaptations as will cause their 
transverse motions to interpenetrate, then, at their mutual 
retraction, condensation must arise along the main axis of 
motion, and in this case there can be no more than a very 
partial restitution so long as the united vibrators remain 
in contact, because each is but straining against the other 
in all directions. Two systems, uniting in this way by 
one or more vibrators of each system, become one com- 
pound system until they are again dissociated, which can 
be only effected through outside co-operation. 

This we hold to be the type of all (&) compounds, of 
all so-called chemical combinations, which, of obvious neces- 
sity, involve more or less modification of the vibratory 
character, with formation of tensions and dissipation of 
free- motion — our interpretation of the nature of the 
change in sensible properties. All such compounds result 



84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

from the co-operation of homologous vibrators (those 
having the same vibratory phases). 

Oppositely directed combinations of complementary 
vibrators (those having opposed vibratory phases) per- 
taining to one and the same atom, generally effected by 
the abstraction of heat or by pressure, fairly account for 
the changes of state from gases to liquids with their 
attending physical modifications. 

(a) In ordinary physical compounding, interatomic 
complementaries of like direction in both phases, in com- 
mon time, can either co-operate end to end or side to 
side. Often there is very little change in sensible prop- 
erties. Such end-to-end unions of two like atoms ex- 
plain the character of elementary molecules, as well as of 
many other aggregations and segregations. Side-to-side 
unions of complementaries though more and less in amounts 
of co-operation with unlike substances and conditions, 
tend to increase dynamic action, free motion, and to 
decrease tensions, obstructed motion, as compared with 
chemical compounds of the same density. Colloids, which 
comprise so large a part of the organic kingdom, are 
supposed to be formed in this way, at least to a very 
considerable extent. They are the only substances in 
which or by means of which molecular vibrations become 
transformed into sensible, molar, or translatory motion, 
into visible and ongoing movement started within the 
mass itself independent of external aid, as in all 
protoplasm. 

All vibrations having the same period being homol- 
ogous, and those differing by the half beat their com- 
plementaries, if an A and a B vibration of like atoms can 
take hands at any stage of their respective periods, very 
little or no modification need result to either system. 
They must unite at or near their extremities and vibrate 
along the same line with a simultaneous reversal. In 
order to do this, the axes of the two atoms must approach 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 85 

each other — that is, if each vibrates in a given circle, the 
two circles must overlap before an extending and a retract- 
ing vibration can be brought into contact. 

When two complementaries do unite under such condi- 
tions the resulting system is a physical molecule, as dis- 
tinguished from the more usual chemical molecule. It is 
the unit of elementary gases. 

FIGS. 8-l6 — DIAGRAMS OF RHYTHMIC MOLECULES. 



■Y 



vY 

Vi 



x'- 




0) *j4 

/m + -Q' '■ 




* 1 

Y 



FIG. 8. 



<A 



Two-atom molecule united by complementary vibrations. Half-way in 
all phases. A physical compound. Type — the molecule of elementary 
gases. 

This class is represented by diagrams 8 and 9. The 
atoms in all of the following diagrams are of the Greek- 
cross pattern and lettered in the same way as those with 
their triple lines ; but a single line here indicates the 
whole vibration. The series of short curves are added to 
represent the accompanying transverse motion. 



86 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 



A compound of the physical kind requires a partial 
revolution of one or both atoms upon its axis in order to 
bring the complementary vibrators into the same line — 
the revolution to be caused by outside help, such as any 
small movement among the particles of a gas, with so much 
crowding as would bring the complementary vibrations 
into contact. If they unite end to end, both moving in 



;Y 



;.X 



xTia' 




B-'Y 



FIG. 9. 

Two-atom molecule united by complementary vibrations, 
elongated ; B, groups retracted. A physical compound. Type— 
of elementary gases. 



A, groups 
the molecule 



the same direction, neither atom need undergo any modi- 
fication of vibratory changes. 

But the united vibrations, while holding each other, 
lose their chances of other co-operations, unless through 
transverse motion. Thus the nascent gases exhibit 
more executive power than the same gases after they 
have assumed the molecular state. Otherwise, the physi- 
cal properties remain the same as before they grouped 






MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION, %*J 

themselves in pairs. This means that their vibrations all 
remain essentially unmodified throughout their entire 
cycle of changes, and the atomic configurations are un- 
modified. 

As the arrows indicate in Fig. 8, each vibration retains 
its own path and direction in the atom relatively to all 
the others, so that each vibration will be entirely normal 
in time and space although one of the systems has been 

..• "*'<B":-:-'"S"-'-.. 




FIG. IO. 

Two atoms in position to unite by homologous vibrations. A, groups 
elongated ; B, groups retracted. A chemical compound. 

turned upon its axis. But as the vibrations are in mutual 
correlation, and have no known relations with space 
(space is only the symbol or convenient measure of their 
actual extensions), this change of position in the atom as 
a whole can have no significance in relation to physical 
properties. 

The relative position of the two atoms enables them 
without vibratory modifications to approach each other 



88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

closer than they otherwise could, to be helpful in increas- 
ing each other's stability, and to lessen the chances of end- 
on collisions, with their mutual repulsion. Hence, most 
elementary systems, instead of remaining isolated atoms, 
unite in pairs and become one molecule. 

The uniting vibrations face in the same direction, the 
one elongating, the other retracting. In Fig. 9, the A 
vibration has reached its outward bound and the B vibra- 
tion its inner limit. At this instant begins the reversal of 
both in direction, B elongating and A retracting. There 
is no interference between the two, but each, in turn, 
extends itself to the axis of its partner, then recedes to 
allow the other to pursue the same path but in the 
opposite direction. The associated vibrators pursue 
their ordinary cycles of change. The molecule as a 
whole has the configuration indicated. If the A groups 
were represented as retracted and the B groups elon- 
gated, the action between B and B' in both atoms 
would be indicated by solid lines, dotted lines taking 
the place of those now solid. The molecule would 
present the same form as in Fig. 8, with the difference in 
vibratory times and positions. The axes of both atoms 
would remain at rest, and the contact of the united vibra- 
tors would continue throughout the cycle of molecular 
changes. 

All compounding without a modification of the proper- 
ties of a substance — as in most adhesions and cohesions — 
belong to the class of physical compounds. There is little 
or no vibratory modification, because the co-operation is 
continued without mutual interference. Such compounds 
may be solid, fluid, or gaseous. If under given condi- 
tions a hydrogen atom requires one volume of space for 
its vibratory changes, the molecule of hydrogen and 
every other gaseous molecule requires two volumes under 
like conditions. 

But if two zigzag lines energizing either in like or in 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 89 

opposed directions should merely touch at the outermost 
points of each zigzag, these would repel each other and 
both lines be moved or tend to be moved farther apart ; 
as in the repulsion of electrical currents and in the repul- 
sions between parallel motions of any kind when brought 
near enough not exactly to coalesce and yet each meas- 
urably to influence the other. 

But chemical or homologous compounds belong to a 
radically different type of unions. In all of these there 
is modification of physical properties. Unless any two 
atoms could merge themselves in virtually one atom by a 
union of their central axes, by construction, their homol- 
ogous union must be the uniting of oppositely directed 
vibrators, which involves the transformation of free motion 
into tension through interference. 

If homologous vibrators could unite at their extremities 
when elongated, they must either separate on retraction 
or their axes would be drawn together and blended. If 
they could remain united without that result, both axes, 
being drawn to and fro with incredible speed, the proper- 
ties of the new compound would be as unlike those of 
both elements as can well be conceived. But as the con- 
tact of homologues end-on would be a clash with repul- 
sion, it is incredible that such a type of unions can 
become permanent. The apparently new substances, 
often with curiously original properties, produced by 
chemical compounding, must be explained as some com- 
position of oppositely directed vibratory action, and the 
varying degrees of modification can be satisfactorily 
explained. 

But should homologous vibrations unite side to side 
while fully or partially elongated, the axes of both systems 
would draw towards each other as the united vibrators 
began to retract in opposite directions ; the result being 
tension along the line of contact, which must hinder com- 
plete retraction and hold the atomic axes more or less 



go 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 



apart. Free motion in both directions being arrested, 
would be distributed elsewhere ; as sensible heat is 
evolved and distributed in chemical combinations, the 
tension remaining as its equivalent. The vibratory 
attempts to elongate must also act in opposed directions. 
Vibrators, having transverse interference, must hinder 
each other's elongations equally with their retractions, and 
such interference must involve more or less all near and 



c.Y 



"'B>V:<|(B 



A 




PL^M. '■ w 



:X 



FIG. II. 



Two-atom molecule united by homologous vibrations. A, groups re- 
tracted ; B, groups elongated. A chemical compound. 



remote correlatives. Hence every associated vibrator 
must have increase of tension, shortened elongations, and 
definite changes in rate, place, and form, though the 
periods of their respective vibrations would remain 
unchanged. 

By reference to the diagrams, the nature of the sup- 
posed various modifications — which correspond with the 
facts of chemical combination — will be apparent. Figs. 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 9 1 

10 to 16 inclusive represent chemical molecules already 
formed or in positions to become combined. 

It will appear from Fig. 10, that, under ordinary condi- 
tions, before homologous vibrations can unite side to side, 
the axes of their respective atoms must be made to 
approach. If they are to unite along their whole length 
as indicated by the diagrams, though merely for the sake 
of uniformity, the uniting vibrators must be elongated and 

(Y :ff iff 

""<B"".<""W"y<""^'"' 



>Y' V > Y ' 



FIG. 12. 
Three atoms in position to form a chemical molecule. 

their atomic centres separated only by the length of one 
vibration at the moment of their union. This corresponds 
to the supposed distance of the atoms of a physical mole- 
cule, and the better to illustrate the different effects which 
must arise through physical and chemical compounding, 
the representations are all made on this plan. 

But it is not probable that two vibrators usually unite 
throughout their entire length. The more stable com- 



92 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

pounds may do this ; but the unstable ones are probably 
much less intimately allied. A side-to-side union of 
more and less partially united vibrators with enough inter- 
ference to transform motion into tension and correspond- 
ing modification of all correlated terms, accompanied by 
an equivalent evolution of heat, will more adequately 
interpret most chemical phenomena. 

Nor does chemical compounding appear to be usually 
preceded by a translation of the atomic axes in such ways 
as to compel the intimate commingling in advance of 
their ordinary vibratory fields. 

On the contrary, chemical unions are generally effected, 
not by translating the atomic centres of gravity — which 
would be most efficiently done by ordinary sensible 
motion, — but rather through extending the vibratory 
elongations by means of communicated heat, electricity, or 
other modes of free motion. Thus the abnormally 
elongated vibrations are enabled to come in contact side 
to side, if their respective paths are adjusted each to the 
other. Two such meeting vibrations, oppositely directed, 
must then unite ; and, other things equal, the resulting 
tension compels the approach of their respective atomic 
centres, with evolution of free motion. 

Probably in most cases of active chemical combination, 
translation and increased elongation are working together 
to guide adapted vibrations into the proper contact. 
Ignorant as we are of actual vibratory structures, it would 
be absurd to assume to indicate special details through 
which the various combinations are produced. One can 
hope only to convey some definite idea of the general 
method of tension-forming by means of oppositely 
directed and correlated motions. 

Whenever there is a readjustment of energies which 
more or less involves the entire co-operative system, these 
must produce a new adjustment of effects upon our 
organs of sense. To our sensations the substances take 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 93 

on new properties. Objectively there is a rhythmic 
variation of heats and tensions in time and space to 
correspond. The compound is also a new substance in 
its co-operations with other substances ; it can now enter 
into still further combinations — from some of which it 
was debarred by its unmodified atomic rhythms. 

If we can comprehend the nature of tensions and of 
the several typical processes which produce tensions from 
the co-operations of actively correlated motions, we shall 
easily comprehend that matter, however solid and passive 
it may appear, is purely, exclusively, motion ; and that 
motion is purely, exclusively, correlated modes of an 
ever-existing power ; and that these co-operative modes 
are demonstrably adequate to produce all conceivable 
phenomena. 

As shown in the diagrams, the formation of a tension 
from opposed motions must always mean a contraction 
of both lines of elongation. Their actual extension is 
not contracted ; their actual energy is not diminished ; 
the difference arises wholly as a transformation of form 
and modes, but, given like conditions otherwise, no 
chemical compound, perhaps no physical one can re- 
quire quite as much leeway for its vibrations as the 
elements required when uncompounded. 

If many vibrators separately unite in a gaseous mole- 
cule, three, five, or twenty of them need have no more 
apparent volume than a molecule of two atoms presuma- 
bly physically united. The hydrogen atom being the 
unit of volume, all gaseous molecules have equal vol- 
umes, and the molecule of many atoms needs no more 
room to work in than the agile hydrogen molecule. Is 
not then the rhythmic ultimate system of motion fairly 
available for the explanation of facts ? Is it not evident 
that tensions, made tense by continuously opposed energy, 
must diminish each other's need of present space for 
active movement ? 



94 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 



Every compound is as much a mathematical product as 
eight is the product of twice four. Different substances, 
occupying different apparent volumes, are made from the 
same elements combined in the same proportions even ; 
but when experimentally tested, shown to be variously 
combined — that is, they are put together in very differ- 



A'A'-A' 



v { pf 



.*© •. o : 




AAA 



£>'&' 



Three-atom molecule united by homologous (A) vibrations. A, groups 
retracted ; B, groups elongated. A chemical molecule. 

ent ways. We know that with a few blocks a boy may 
construct many unlike figures, but it is not enough to 
regard the molecules of isomeric substances simply as 
differently put together. They put themselves into their 
unlike configurations by actively uniting in different 
amounts, thus producing unlike amounts as well as kinds of 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 95 



tensions — with corresponding unlike amounts of rejected 
free motion. The differenced tensions we recognize as 
dissimilar properties. But it is essential to mental rest 
that we should be able to think rational and possible co- 
operative methods competent to produce these unlike 
properties. There is nothing satisfactory in simply being 
able to affirm that a diamond is carbon so put together 



B 



3. 



B 




A/'O : ">yt<> 



Ah A 



. i 

B 



B'" 



FIG. 14. 



B' 



Three-atom molecule united by homologous (A) vibrations, 
elongated ; B, groups retracted. A chemical molecule. 



A, groups 



that it is transparent to the light, and charcoal is carbon 
put together so differently that it is not transparent to 
light. We still ask : Why are they so different ? Why 
can the diamond so beautifully help the sunshine on its 
way rejoicing, while the charcoal can only bury it in the 
depths of its own blackness ? 

If the co-operation of different vibrators, with unlike 
rhythmic changes, producing greater, less, and dissimilar 



96 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

strains and elasticities, can be accepted as proximate 
causes ; if we are able to think of the ultimate parts of the 
diamond as moving to a rhythm so far in unison with that 
of light that all the rays can move on uninterruptedly 
through it, or some portion be flashed out to us from the 
surface, while the discordant rhythms of the charcoal 
can only respond by becoming confusedly heated, this is 
certainly a comfortable advance in the way of explana- 
tion — possible at any rate to our apprehension. 

It is found that in compounds having similar combining 
methods and some similarity of properties, the same ele- 
ment uniformly appropriates the same space — retains the 
same atomic volume. But the atomic volume differs with 
a differenced tension, as nitrogen has one volume when 
combined with carbon in cyanogen and another com- 
bined with oxygen in nitrous vapor. A " radical " 
remaining in permanent combination may repeatedly 
exchange less stably united atoms for those of a different 
element which can unite in a similar manner, with about 
the same relation of tensions and free motions — indicated 
by the liberation of heat — and with similar reactions in 
co-operation with other substances and in their effects 
upon our sensations. 

Energy in compounds represents the combined energy 
of the elements. But in the most permanent substances 
this energy is represented by tensions — not by free 
motions. It has become tangible matter to be appre- 
hended by our senses and able effectually to resist our at- 
tempts to change its substance in any other way than 
through the agency of other forces subtle enough to un- 
loose the fastenings by which every part is grappled to 
every other by the innate power in both, which must be 
turned in some new direction before it will let go its 
present modes of energizing. 

The interlocked motion seems dull and inert measured 
by outside standards ; it is fully utilized in maintaining its 



MATTER A COMPLEX OE MODES OF MOTION. g? 

opposed tensions. Unlock these, set the bound energies 
measurably free, and every atom is itself again, a living 
centre of motions as unresting as a ray of sunshine on its 
way through the throbbing ether. The proverbial clod- 
dishness of solid matter is but the steady poise of an Atlas 
supporting a world upon his shoulders. Remove the 
world and the giant can puff down all the forests round 
about with a breath. Tensions and free motions are the two 
distinctly opposite types of energy. Wherever there is 
most tension there is least motion, and vice versa. The 
freest modes require the most free space. 

Chemical union is the mechanical increase of tension ; 
and all its facts and processes can be explained by mechan- 
ical laws if we admit that an atom is a rhythmic centre of 
variously polarized vibrations each of which represents a 
distinct mode and quantity of energy. When a definite 
number of vibrators are combined in what has been 
called chemical union, there are still those or others free 
enough to co-operate in other physical processes, as in 
reflecting light, radiating heat ; drawing tenser lines of 
contractive co-operation, as in gravitation ; conducting or 
resisting the conduction of electricity, etc. 

The chemists have learned ingeniously to produce certain 
desired compounds by the systematic introduction of 
motion, in some form, in order to accomplish the required 
composition of elements or of radicals and elements. 

Also, chemists introduce motion in order to decompose 
existing compounds, and the shaking apart can be accom- 
plished as readily as the shaking together. Atoms with 
vibrating lines which will interlock if brought together in 
a free state by communicated motion can also be shaken 
apart by energetic adapted motion. 

The equilibrium of every molecular system must be contin- 
uously maintained about a common centre of gravity ; but 
at the same time, a distinct equilibration of motions and ten- 
sions in exact balance about each atomic centre must be 

7 



9 8 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 



continuously achieved by every constituent atom in its own 
behalf. If the perfect atomic equipoise could be in any 
way disturbed, a fact so disastrous would involve the 
destruction of its constitutional correlativity. To assume 



— > syyio 



■ffM'"":-:"'"«B 



"A$ 




J *: ' 



m^t ' ' * —J •'. r-V • • I TV 



* /VYIO 



-^yy%o 



<B 



FIG. 15. 
Five atoms in position to form a chemical molecule. 

that it could be otherwise, would be like supposing that a 
triangle, because it has been placed in certain relationships 
with other triangles, can lose the mathematical ratios be- 
tween its own angles and between sides and angles and 
yet remain a triangle. 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 99 

By construction, an atom being a system of harmonic 
motions equilibrated by each other about a common axis, 
this balance can be disturbed under no conditions except 
by involving atomic annihilation. Hence any increase of 
tension in the compounded vibrators of a molecule must 
involve counterbalancing modifications in all correlated 
terms. It is impossible to modify one term only of a 
relation. Tension in the combined vibrators probably 




a\::.„ 

a'aV: 



A' 



FIG. 16. 

Five-atom molecule united by four A and four B vibrations. A, groups 
retracted ; B, groups elongated. A chemical molecule. 

involves a responsive tension in the uncombined vibrators. 
Their elongations and retractions must alike be impeded 
and in part prevented. 

In the diagrams, retracted vibrators are mainly repre- 
sented by the dotted half circles, the better to show that 
they remain unchanged in phases and periods, and in 
balancing positions and functions ; but in all chemical 
molecules, evidently the vibrators not directly com- 
pounded can be neither fully retracted nor fully elon- 



IOO THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

gated. At any rate the new properties of a compound 
are abundantly explained by correlated action. 

Mendelej eft's periodic law, that the properties of ele- 
ments and their compounds stand in periodic relation to 
their atomic weights, receives confirmation and elucida- 
tion. If, as we saw reasons to infer, — atoms increased in 
tensions, as the elementary substances seem to do in 
something like a definite serial order of tension increase — 
that under like conditions the heavier atoms have only 
an equal amount of efficient free motion with the lighter 
ones, the properties of such elements must also be modi- 
fied in serial relations. Properties, especially such as 
produce sensations, are as much subjective as objective, 
and are our interpretations of different modes of co-oper- 
ation. Thus with varying ratios between free motions 
and tension must arise mathematically differenced proper- 
ties, however interpreted by ourselves. 

Each atom remains as distinct and as truly individual 
while chemically associated as though vibrating in entire 
isolation. The atomic centre of gravity is the natural 
fulcrum of dependent surrounding vibrations ; it is their 
opposition of action which constitutes it the one centre of 
rest as related to their endless movement. This atomic 
axis remains intact in the midst of all possible compound- 
ing ; it may be variously translated here and there, but 
it remains and must remain the central pivot of all atomic 
processes. This principle, involved in the theory, is essen- 
tial practically. 

The centre of gravity in a molecule and in every larger 
mass is a resultant position. It may coincide with some 
atomic centre, as it does in a three- or a five-atom mole- 
cule ; or it may not coincide, as it does not in a two-atom 
molecule. No vibration makes a molecular centre its 
necessary point of departure and return, the pivot from 
which it acts and reacts in harmonic rhythm whether iso- 
lated or in co-operation, and from which its energy must 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. IOI 

be reckoned as some power of the distance. Every 
vibratory centre is atomic. 

In clumsy human calculations, clumsy compared with 
Nature's infinitely more minute and detailed methods 
of co-operation and equilibration — a general centre of 
gravity is important and sufficient. The wonderful 
achievements to which it has contributed are marvellous. 
Beyond that, a mass centre of gravity can have no signifi- 
cance except as the position around which all co-operative 
atomic centres, however various their individual modes, 
are continuously in nicely adjusted equipoise. This com- 
mon centre of gravity, which pertains to each visible body 
separately, may shift every moment within narrow limits, 
because of varying interactions between the body and its 
surroundings; often it is the axis of most irregularly 
shaped bodies having great apparent lack of symmetry. 

So long as molecular combinations, physical adhesions 
and other co-operative modes can maintain the complex 
equilibrium, primarily about each atomic centre and sec- 
ondarily about this common centre, the system can continue 
to manifest itself as one body. 

It appears, then, that every element of every ultimate 
atom acts exclusively and continuously from itself — acts 
exclusively and continuously in and of itself; but the 
modifications in the forms of its acting arise exclusively and 
continuously from without itself through co-operations. It 
is these modifications of motion, then, which are correlative, 
and are always, in their essential nature, double-sided. It 
is from the added compounding of simpler modifications 
into more and more complex modifications that all of the 
more complex phenomena are produced. 

The primary motions are continuous co-operations ; the 
outgrowing phenomena are continuous co-co-operations. 

The increasing complexity of these co-operations pro- 
duces an increasing evolution of more and more complex 
forms, adapted to continually broader or more specialized 



102 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

functions. There is apparent increase of definiteness in 
the more widely differentiated modes, especially when 
regarded in the light of their adaptations to the uses of 
life ; but, according to the new theory, there has been a 
perfect definiteness, accurately mathematical in kind, at 
every step of the way during the long progress from 
atomic isolation with simple vibratory and intervibratory 
co-operations up to the highest organisms with their 
myriad-fold and infinitely diversified adaptations. 

The very essence of every motion is heterogeneity. Even 
the primary energies immanent in each motion are so far 
heterogeneous that they are oppositely directed. 

But to return to the primary units of motion, the atoms 
and their simpler modifications ; their changes from first 
to last are held to be purely and exclusively mechanical 
changes. Even the curious, the seemingly mysterious and 
occult odd and even atomicities or valencies of atoms 
must be interpreted to arise because of their special 
rhythmic forms and modes of co-operation. The dia- 
grams represent only a few vibrations upon a plane sur- 
face. If we mentally add intermediate vibrations, moving 
in and out from the axis of the system in several planes 
of a three-dimension space, with different lengths of elon- 
gation, we shall realize that these supplementary arms — 
all needed to act their several parts in the complexities of 
manifold co-operations — must be either helps or hin- 
drances towards the compounding of specially adapted 
vibrators belonging to different atomic centres. 

End-on collisions being in the nature of the case but 
slightly co-operative must be easily disturbed or pre- 
vented. Then, as unless there is free motion to be trans- 
ferred from one to the other, they must be simply 
repulsions, certain atoms with vibrators otherwise well 
adapted to unite might be mechanically kept asunder 
— their alliance unmade, hindered, perhaps prevented, 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 103 

except in special conditions, by correlatives never largely 
concerned in the actual combination. 

Any system structurally adapted to unite with two or 
four others simultaneously, being able in doing so to 
preserve both the atomic and the molecular equilibrium 
of motions and tensions, would be naturally bivalent or 
quadrivalent. Other systems might be univalent or tri- 
valent, chiefly because of the difference in form at the 
opportune moments when combination would be feasible. 
There must be not only adjustment of vibration to vibra- 
tion, but a coincident adjustment of oppositely directed 
vibrations, before chemical combination can arise. It is 
certainly probable, that odd and even valencies might 
result from unlikenesses in rhythmic configurations. The 
valency of an atom does not determine its " affinity " — 
that is, its combining intensity. That depends upon the 
mutual adaptedness of the combining systems when act- 
ually brought into co-operation. 

One need not assume it possible to specify detailed 
causes of differences in valency. It is a difference so 
characteristic that unions with many unlike partners are 
evidently affected upon the same general plan — making 
the substitution of one substance for another, in a com- 
pound, of easy occurrence. Compounds, shown in this 
way to have similar modes of formation, have also simi- 
larities of properties. The substitute takes the place of 
the other with comparatively small disturbance of estab- 
lished rhythms ; this is the sufficient explanation of 
chemical substitution. Such bonds usually are readily 
formed, readily dissolved, and usually the resulting physi- 
cal modifications are not large. 

According to theory, the uncompounded vibrations of 
a molecule should be more or less crippled and disqualified 
for further unions, because of shortened elongations and 
more rigidity. Here, again, facts sustain the theory. 



104 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Molecules once formed usually tenaciously maintain their 
chemical individuality or become dissociated. They are 
not fully available for additional compounding, even when 
they still have " unsaturated " valencies ; but they can 
be made to unite with other substances if they can do 
so without molecular readjustments of a disturbing 
kind. 

Molecules, saturated or not, freely unite with like mole- 
cules to form homogeneous, and with unlike molecules to 
form heterogeneous, fluids and solids-with no other change 
of properties than that of greater and less adhesion or 
solidification. These are physical combinations, but they 
show that tensions are not inactive, though not readily 
available for chemical combinations. The difference must 
be largely one of method — a physical union being possible 
with the simplest contact. But chemical alliances of any 
degree of permanence require a considerable extent of 
side-to-side interpenetrating co-operation. 

The odd and the even valencies seem to work together 
the more satisfactorily because of their unlike formal 
arrangements. However figured, the molecule is a balanced 
system of unending pulsations, which work together in 
self-adjusting harmony. It is not needful that combining 
vibrations should be equal in amounts of energy. Their 
actions and reactions must be equal ; but the feebler ally, 
being unable to hold its own, as a whole, with contact the 
axis of its system is made to approach the axis of the 
other system, as a light body is drawn to the heavier one 
although the pull between them is equal. In this way is 
explained the occlusion of some of the lighter gases by 
the heavier metals. We have only to suppose that hydro- 
gen is drawn to platinum on that principle ; that their 
vibrations are too remote in kind to hold permanently 
together; and that the hydrogen becomes fluid or even 
solid in consequence of effects produced by the other 
metal through its reactions. 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 105 

The change of state from a liquid to a solid, from a gas 
to a liquid or solid, and the reverse changes, must also be 
explained. A gas becomes liquid under great pressure. 
The abstraction of a large quantity of heat produces the 
same result. What must be the immediate effect in both 
cases? The pressure crowds the vibrations into closer 
contact, and if to dissipate free motion in the form of heat 
shortens and correspondingly broadens the elongations, 
that also must bring the vibrations of any given atom or 
molecule into closer quarters. In such cases contiguous 
outgoing and ingoing vibrators, coming into side-contact, 
would behave like any other oppositely directed interfering 
motions — combine in producing tension with its lineal 
contractions. The output would be immense molecular 
condensation, such as occurs when gas is changed to a 
liquid. The condensed molecule, for reasons already in- 
dicated, would tend to remain, as it does in liquids, meas- 
urably independent but ready for small temporary 
adhesions to its neighbors, and in exactly the circum- 
stances to avail itself of their helpful local repulsions to 
enable it to circulate freely in their midst. With increased 
pressure or further loss of heat, arises solidification, its less 
mobility, and its more permanent adhesions. 

Can an hypothesis which explains so many phenomena 
be either preposterous or baseless ? If not, the compound- 
ing of oppositely directed vibrators within the molecule 
itself, aided by the needful conditions, gives us a fourth 
class of tension-forming, and equally explains the nature of 
reversed dissociation with dynamic increase and expan- 
sion. These intramolecular modes can fairly explain all 
transformations affecting the simpler physical conditions. 

In many changes to the solid state, there are evidently 
molecular and intermolecular and often both chemical and 
physical combinations — sometimes accompanied by par- 
tial dissociation. 

The crystal-forming tendency must be mainly of the 



106 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

slighter hand-taking variety, in which little or no change of 
vibratory rhythm is involved beyond that of solidification. 
But in crystal-forming we have an example of another va- 
riety of physical compounding, in which obvious correlated 
changes arise in the vibratory directions ; it is as though 
each of the uniting vibrators helped to impel its fellow 
into a new vibratory path. And why not ? Motion is 
infinitely mobile ! As the direction of the vibratory ener- 
gizing has no significance except as related to the system's 
equilibrium, such results are highly probable and fairly ac- 
count for the facts. Later on we shall find instances of 
much more decided transpositions of correlated vibratory 
paths. The beautiful regularity and symmetry of crys- 
talline forms, the mathematical order and system which 
they illustrate, and the uniformity of like results under like 
conditions are all a visible guaranty that atomic and 
molecular equipoise are alike maintained and alike co-oper- 
ative in establishing at once the single crystal's centre of 
gravity, and also the common centre, the positions of 
efficient equilibration for the asssociated group of crystals 
as a whole. 

The changes involved in assuming different crystalline 
forms in combinations with different partners, the iso- 
meric forms which may be supposed to arise because the 
vibrators can become united in various ways, and all of the 
other many differentiations which result in all kinds of 
associations and dissociations, become apriori necessities 
if we begin by assuming the persistence of active rhythmic 
units of motion with balanced vibrators. 

Among gases, the ratios between pressures, tempera- 
tures, and volumes, uniform within given limits, in the 
nature of things must begin to vary whenever free motion 
begins to be transformed into tension through the union 
of oppositely directed vibrators. The theory may help 
us to comprehend also why, under certain conditions, the 
particles of a gas, which have been mutually repulsive 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 1 07 

hitherto, seem at certain distances even to become mu- 
tually attractive. 

By the theory, attraction and repulsion, as such, can 
have no direct relation to distance, and even no existence 
per se. The relation of dynamic energy to distance is 
wholly dependent upon the amount of transformation 
which at any position has been effected between free mo- 
tion and the tension into which the free motion is being 
transformed. In reversed conditions, when tension is being 
transformed into free motion, the dynamic energy depends 
upon the amount which at that position has been trans- 
formed into free motion. There is no motion — not even 
that of the translation of a solid body — in which tension 
is not on the whole either gaining upon free motion or 
else free motion is gaining upon tension. Motion is in- 
herently some combination of these two opposed but 
co-operative modes. 

Attractions and repulsions being purely mechanical 
effects, may be greater or less in amounts according to 
the positions in which they become co-operative; but 
whether they will be attractions or repulsions must de- 
pend entirely upon the methods in which they are brought 
into co-operation. If they can collide and separate they 
will be mutually repulsive. If they collide but become 
so entangled that each must check the free progress of the 
other, their entangled motions become tensions, and the 
effect will be that of a mutual attraction. 

When gases under pressure seem to have become sud- 
denly attractive at close distances, it is because oppositely 
directed vibrations are brought into such contact that 
small tensions begin to take the place of repulsions ; that 
is, the small side-to-side meetings take precedence over 
the end-to-end collisions. As already noted, when pres- 
sure is carried greatly beyond this stage, the tensions 
then so predominate that the gas becomes a liquid or 
a solid. 



108 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

Theory requires the interstellar ether to have the same 
atomic character as all other matter, but with its tensions 
and free motions in very different proportions. An 
ether particle, in order to perform the part assigned to it, 
must have a maximum of free motion and a minimum of 
tension — that is, it must have an immense length of 
vibratory elongation before its free motion becomes so 
far transformed into tension that reversal of direction can 
begin ; but, given that constitution, it may possess all the 
properties usually assigned to it. It can do as much work 
as can reasonably be demanded of it, or as is currently 
attributed to it. 

That such an ether could penetrate the unoccupied 
interstices of the most solid matter, in the same way that, 
of many unlike gases, each promptly finds its own place 
in space already filled to overflowing with matter whose 
lines of action do not seriously interfere with its own, is 
obvious. Whatever work is exacted of the ether, like all 
other physical work, must be co-operation between differ- 
entiated elements, and accompanied by the unending 
conversion of free motion into tension, or the reverse. 
Thus, ether-primary-systems, like all other matter, would 
be rhythmic in character. 

If such systems could combine oppositely directed 
vibrators under certain conditions, then by methods 
similar to those in which gases are supposed to become 
liquid, ether might become ordinary matter or some ap- 
proximation to ordinary matter. But whether ultimate 
atoms are or are not uniform in primary harmonic structure, 
their modes of interatomic co-operation at the present time 
can be interpreted to be essentially the same in kind. 

All laws, by physical necessity, lie wholly within the 
domain of the accurately correlative. Modifications un- 
limited in extent can be produced, but only through 
cumulative stages by modifying all related terms simul- 
taneously and equivalently. No phase of change is 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 109 

isolated. Time cannot abridge constitutional relativity. 
Physical necessity knows only one law — that of correla- 
tive action and reaction which dominates all physical 
processes. The relative is rigidly the correlative. Corre- 
lation, being the one condition of the conditioned universe 
and its phenomena, controls and directs the cumulative 
modifications of evolving complexity. Each sensible 
change is made up of groups of simpler changes ; but any 
one phase is never added by itself alone. Self-adjusting 
modifications, maintaining a continuous accord in every 
part of a co-operative system, can establish comparatively 
permanent variations in the forms and properties of visible 
masses. Hence bodies appear unchanging though we 
know them to be in an endless manifold of unrest. 

In all co-operation whenever one term is modified all 
others must become simultaneously modified by reaction. 
This principle enfolds the entire explanation both of dif- 
ferentiated energies and of differentiated substances. Our 
task is only that of trying to indicate the nature of such 
differentiations ; is only that of attempting to give a 
rational analysis of processes, an intelligent explanation of 
existing phenomena. 

In transformations from liquid to solid forms there is 
often very little condensation and change of density. In 
a few instances, as when water freezes, there is apparent 
increase of volume with decrease of density — showing 
that the process must be very largely physical as dis- 
tinguished from chemical compounding. The several 
varieties in the same class of phenomena accord with 
other coroborrative facts and afford an added support 
to the theory. 

Intrinsically, it is evident that while all motion must 
have some positive place, with added space for its changes, 
yet no motion can have a preference for any particular 
place. Provided a moving equilibrium is always and 
everywhere maintained, any number of related changes 



IIO THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

in the positions of vibratory paths can be of no impor- 
tance in atomic or in interatomic economy. Any body 
may be moved on in place with the readiest facility 
provided a perpetually correlated balance is steadily 
maintained. 

That tensions do directly result from interfering 
motion, that solids may arise from the friction of liquids, 
is not left to theory alone to demonstrate. Motion 
applied to fluids, " impressed upon " any fluids, pro- 
duces rigidity, solidity, and other legitimate effects of 
stress or tension. If the action can be so applied that the 
motion is not quickly dissipated, as when sufficient pres- 
sure is applied to fluids, abiding tensions will remain. 
Experiment has shown this ; it can repeat the showing in 
many ways at any time, and can prove that there is no 
generic difference between molecular and molar motion — 
the one being the derivative of the other. Motion " im- 
pressed upon " matter is motion meeting opposed motion ; 
by the theory, is vibrations meeting oppositely directed 
vibrations in such ways that their interfering pulsations 
produce a common stress, a mutual hindrance to the 
freedom which obtained at the instant before they were 
brought together. Thus the apparent passiveness and 
fixity of all tensions in reality is active strain in opposed 
directions, as already stated. 

In the light of the theory many facts become obvious, 
necessary phenomena. A loosely linked chain becomes 
rigid when whirled about in a resisting atmosphere. 
Mutually approaching bodies produce many of the effects 
of actual contact when to all appearance they do not 
actually touch. A loose string may, by enough motion 
applied to it, be made to cut like a sharp steel edge. The 
sand blast — in which, in every grain of sand, the rate of 
pulsing motion and the elongation of the vibrations are 
quickened without change in the vibratory time — can 
achieve its delicate chiselling because the invisible blades 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. Ill 

of pure motion, by swift onset, loosen the hold of masses 
infinitely small, upon which they seize, and remove by 
combined effort, from the larger mass acted upon. An 
air blast is equally effective minus the weight of the 
translated sand — which represents superior force. 

The sensible blow dealt by a body in moderate motion 
is so closely comparable to the blow which may knock one 
down when the more rapidly moving body does not 
actually strike him, makes it presumable that some kind 
of cushion is interposed in both cases. The obvious 
cushion is the atmosphere ; its innumerable vibrators 
receive and moderate the oncoming motion, transforming 
a part of it into tensions of their own ; but when the 
motion becomes too rapid they too become stinging 
blades, ready to cleave their way into living nerves. 

The ether is generally brought into service as mediator 
between particles of ordinary matter and between their 
combined co-operative processes, though how an inter- 
mediate can be supposed to work with them in any better 
or different way from their modes of direct co-operation 
with each other, no one has yet explained. Literal 
motion-systems could, we know, co-operate effectively by 
their own rhythmic vibrators. Their exchanged modes 
might be carried onward by intermediating vibrators even 
to infinite distances under very favorable conditions. 

Ether being presumably motion in its simplest, most 
independent, and but little involved state, could assist 
through modified co-operations of its own, differing in 
degree but not in kind from the modes of common mat- 
ter. Terrestrial phenomena can be explained by the 
copartnerships of the ordinary solid, liquid, and gaseous 
matter of the earth. The semi-detached vibrators of 
the primary systems should be able to produce in strict 
accord with theory every phenomenon now assigned to 
the ether, or the ether may co-operate upon one and the 
same plan. 



112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

The comparatively free vibrators, supposed to surround 
all masses, large and small, like an ever active halo whose 
filaments are established within the mass itself, should 
prove to be an all-sufficient atmosphere of helpful energy, 
environing each denser, more tension-bound nucleus, 
and to be a sufficient cushion of mediation between what 
would be otherwise disastrously colliding tensions. 

All adhesiveness, capillary effects, and aggregation into 
sensible bodies most unquestionably might result from 
co-operative motions. Matter undoubtedly might be a 
complex of modes of motion ; and since we have no bet- 
ter explanation of its origin than that of correlated and 
mutually conditioned motion, the legitimate inference is 
that matter is purely and exclusively motion, and that 
motion is internal, not external transformation. 

Science fully comprehends that stress or rigidity is the 
invariable immediate effect of all collisions. There is the 
arrest of motion by counter-motion. In the instant of 
contact with mutual push there arise a demonstrated 
stress and its recoil. The so-called " dead matter," the 
apparently inanimate bodies, are simply tensions which 
might be called polarized in two directions. The mutual 
strains are pitted against each other, not in one con- 
tinuous pull — which inevitably would soon produce a 
separation, — but the strain is alternately reversed, and is 
thus an alternating push and pull which neutralize each 
other into a virtually constant tension. Thus facts and 
the theory tally with much mutual confirmation. It is 
impossible to treat of motion without falling back upon 
material substances, or to treat of substances and forget 
their perpetual motions. 

Organic, many-atomed molecules are eminently of the 
variable type. Organic functions involve both continuous 
association and dissociation, and the molecular struc- 
ture of most organic particles seems to be itself variable 
under varying conditions. 



MATTER A COMPLEX OF MODES OF MOTION. 113 

Inorganic compounds, especially the simpler ones, have 
very definite constituents. Valency there, is compara- 
tively fixed, accessible, and provable. The atoms come 
together from almost measurable distances. After their 
methods of taking possession they occupy definite areas 
which, if they cannot be measured, can be readily esti- 
mated. But organic molecules are composed of countless 
hoards of simultaneously combining and de-combining 
atoms all clustered within one molecular space. In the 
nature of the case their combinations must often be both 
slight and transient ; yet the living molecular rhythm, 
though infinite in its varieties, evidently maintains itself 
in alert and beautiful equipoise as one harmonious com- 
monwealth, despite the frequent additions and subtrac- 
tions, and, often, the presence of both molar and 
molecular motion. 

It is by no means childishly fanciful to imagine that 
probably the shorter atomic vibrations may, in these 
crowded molecules, be often able to come in contact and 
unite — adding their fresh co-operations to swell the com- 
plexity of the great molecular rhythm. 

Nor is it inexplicable that visible molar motion begins 
to first manifest itself in protoplasm. Many co-operative 
rhythms must beat in wonderful unison before the 
smallest visible part could be expected to take a common 
direction — as if moved by one impulse. Still more 
marvellously complex alliances would be essential before 
a finger or an arm could be enabled to freely move as 
one mass. 

Unceasing action and reaction in every part of each 
primary vibration means that at every point in the line of 
co-operation each mode finds its fulcrum in its neighbors, 
thus at the same time helping itself towards its own goal 
and its partners towards theirs, with commensurate steady 
interchange of modes. The same principle applied be- 
tween vibration and vibration in the same atom establishes 



114 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

the atomic centre of gravity ; applied between molecule 
and molecule, the co-operation enables either or both to 
move to new positions ; applied between part and part 
of a sensible mass, portions massive enough to appeal to 
our senses may not merely move and be moved, but the 
self-poised mechanism can give it a large variety of move- 
ments by ceaselessly adjusting itself to its functions 
through the adapted losses and gains of balancing 
elements. 

Nor must we here altogether ignore the influence of 
feeling in directing and modifying various motion pro- 
cesses. According to our hypothesis the living or sentient 
impulse is the initiating and purposive factor which leads 
to all organization from the lowest to the highest. But 
as we are now dealing only with matter and its methods, 
considerations of that kind are left for future discussion. 




LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND, AND THEIR 
TRANSFERENCE. 

That the so-called energies or free motions are distin- 
guished from substances, tensions, masses, or bound 
motions, all will admit. That these energies are free 
modes of motion in some way differenced in kind, science 
has demonstrated. The question now is, are light, heat, 
sound, and other free modes the vibrations of atomic 
parts which are largely tensions — as our hypothetic vibra- 
tors, — or are they the vibrations of the atomic wholes ? In 
radiation, do they move in waves through a homogeneous 
fluid, the ether, or in what other way can we conceive of 
their active transference ? 

If we call to mind that all machines devised by men 
are made to transmit energy from one point to another 
by the harmonic movement of parts and not by motion 
of the entire system, our hypothetic transference of 
molecular modes may seem the more reasonable. 

All machines transmit power from one point to another 
on exactly one and the same general principle. The 
theory claims that the insensible portions of all substan- 
ces, through their rhythmic movements of parts, become 
the appropriators, the radiators, and the carriers of free 
motion in accordance with the same general plan. No 
form of energy ever travels without the aid of helping 
tensions ; none is ever handed from tension to tension 
without the actual contact which furnishes a practical 
continuity of route. 

"5 



Il6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Whether transference of power in working machinery- 
be effected by means of a continuous moving band, by a 
vibrating shaft receiving free motion at one point and 
depositing it at another — as a hammer swung by machin- 
ery and dealing its blow at the place where it is needed, 
by heat communicated at one end of a rod and left to 
travel by conduction, or by any other of the manifold and 
often complex contrivances through which men conduct 
power and constrain it to do whatever work they desire, 
the principle is always the same. The free energy, 
whether unchanged in mode or transformed in the process 
of transmission by the character of the conducting tension, 
is sent on its way in continuous correlation with the series 
of tensions by the aid of which it is transferred. An 
arrow, flying into the air, carries with it the free energy 
of translation ; in piercing the end of a long row of blocks 
in contact, it sends a large part of the same energy into 
the first block, that forwards it to the next, and because 
there is an open channel of equal action and reaction 
along the row, only the last block falls forward out of its 
place. The atmospheric tensions, being comparatively 
small and readily displaced, cannot immediately take on 
so large an amount of motion and give in exchange 
enough reacting motion to keep this last block from 
falling. Thus free energy is scattered, transformed, dis- 
tributed to fresh correlations with a larger and larger 
group of tensions. 

The blocks are in continuous contact to sight and touch, 
but proved to be very far from a solid continuity ; theory 
assumes that in every portion of the seeming solidity 
there are infinitesimal vibratory parts corresponding to 
the swinging hammer and the revolving band, and per- 
forming the same function in the transference of energy. 
Receiving it at one position, they carry it on to another — 
utilizing their own constitutional rhythm to this end. 
Surplus free motion being received — probably at or near 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. WJ 

vibratory elongation — is carried through the system and 
transferred to another which repeats a similar process. In 
this way the travelling energy is sent along what is prac- 
tically a continuous chain of vibrations. 

So long as the mode of transmission is unmodified, the 
energy remains unmodified. But substances differing in 
minor details transmit motion with corresponding varia- 
tions in method, as any two unlike machines work in 
somewhat different ways. With every change in the 
forwarding process, arises commensurate change in the 
travelling energy and in its manifestations. The energy 
must co-operate throughout in promoting its own trans- 
mission. 

With any such change in the mechanism of transfer- 
ence as comes when the travelling energy must pass 
from a solid to a fluid or from a fluid to a solid, it usually 
is manifestly itself modified in mode and direction. Thus 
a beam of light passing from the atmosphere into water is 
bent out of its course. The same light sent through a 
transmitting prism is not only changed in directions, but 
it is visibly split up into many distinct rays — each sent 
onward at a definite divergence. Does not this one fact 
go far towards establishing the theory of distinct differ- 
entiated lines of vibration in the primary structure of the 
atom ? These lines, entering into all compounds, are the 
carriers of the adapted free energy, which of course fol- 
lows their route. 

The many differentiated substances have no one way 
of receiving and dealing with radiated heat and light. 
Clear glass is almost as transparent as the air or as the 
ether itself so long as the received energy is kept within 
the limits of the visible or visual rays ; but to the heat 
rays and their longer transverse wavelets, the same glass 
is opaque, it rejects such rays, turning them back towards 
whence they came. In other words it repels them and 
must be itself repelled by them. We may regard it as a 



Il8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

case of end-to-end collision between oppositely directed 
vibrations. But lampblack absorbs the light and freely 
transmits the heat rays, as do many black bodies. The 
same free motion is received in numberless diverse ways 
by the insensible parts of the receiving substances. 

In general, transparent and semitransparent bodies 
freely transmit light of all or of most kinds, sometimes 
with, sometimes without, a manifest change of direction ; 
but they absorb or reject all other lines of solar energy. 
The opaque bodies of different colors reflect — that is, 
reject — certain lines special to themselves lying within the 
spectrum, and others which do not produce sensible effects ; 
yet others they absorb, and still others they transmit. 

A few substances are powerfully enough affected by 
oncoming energy from the sun, mostly from the ultra 
violet side of the spectrum, where transverse vibration is 
most energetic and rapid, to respond with chemical re- 
actions ; and nearly all bodies are bleached or changed in 
color by the sunlight. It is well known that the green 
color of vegetation can only be formed by the help of 
light. Thus there is shown to be co-operation everywhere 
between the received free motion and its receiver, and the 
energy which is simply forwarded without producing any 
sensible effect upon the medium through which it is 
transmitted, must yet at every point en route both act and 
react in orthodox connection with its temporary host. 
Free motion must become tension and tension be retrans- 
formed to motion as in all other active copartnerships. 

The interstellar ether sends onward all rays of light and 
heat with equal facility at equal rates of progression and 
apparently without the final slighest transformation of 
any special energy during its ether transit. Evidently 
then there must be some sense in which the ether is a 
homogeneous body throughout. But is it the homo- 
geneousness of a uniform structureless fluid, or the 
homogeneousness of other pure atmospheres composed 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND, 119 

of distinct atoms or molecules like the elementary gases 
and the earth's atmosphere ? 

The transference of energy, in the nature of the case, 
is a correlated operation, and as the ether works in rela- 
tion, its distinctive existence as the ether must be a relative 
existence. Besides, the theory of wave motion in a struc- 
tureless ether has proved itself inadequate to explain all 
of the known facts concerning radiation. Some atomic 
character is now currently attributed to that wonderfully 
attenuated substance, whose energy is so immense and so 
rapid in its space activities that it is able to transmit — not 
one but many — distinct and separable modes of motion 
190,000 miles in a second of time. Evidently this ethereal 
substance is in a very different condition and behaves in 
many ways very differently from any of the tangible 
bodies which belong properly to our own planet. And 
yet its correlativeness of constitution, its vibratory modes, 
and its methods of co-operating with and sending forward 
all of the free energy which comes to it, may be virtually 
the same with that of all other vibratory systems. 

Suppose the ether particle, like all other atoms, to be 
a system of motion composed of many equilibrated har- 
monic vibrations, in each of which free motion and ten- 
sion are mutually convertible. If the atomic centre of 
one of these particles remains nearly or completely at 
rest in transference of light and heat, the restitution 
force in each vibrator must be immense ; but the elonga- 
tion of an outgoing vibration is easily equivalent in its 
rate and extent ! The inconceivably rapid is not more im- 
possible or mysterious than the inconceivably small, the 
unthinkably great. If energy can be limited to modes of 
vibration, which act only within ordinary atomic spaces, 
what shall hinder the same principle of correlation from 
establishing other systems of vibrations which may 
sweep through almost unlimited spaces in an inconceiv- 
able brevity of time ? 



120 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

When free motion evolved in the sun is communicated 
to these ether vibrators, what could result except an 
almost measureless elongation followed by as rapid a 
retraction ? and as even this infinitely attenuated line of 
energy must be complex and co-operative within itself, if 
each vibrator has its own special correlations, its trans- 
verse wavelets will be accurately determinate and differ- 
entiated from all others unlike itself. 

No one can deny that the hypothesis would very fairly 
account for the actual phenomena ; or that such exact 
and definite lines of energy would not better indicate the 
real facts than any other kind of wave motion yet sug- 
gested. It needs only that the travelling energy received 
by each vibrator be precisely enough after passing through 
this particle — first with an ingoing then with an outgoing 
direction with homologous elements — to enable the last to 
but just meet a homologous neighbor at their elongation, 
be transferred to it, and move on in the same way with 
its retraction and its homologue's elongation to the next 
vibrator in the direct line of propagation. 

The free motion would in this manner travel with its 
carriers, with their help, in their directions, and at their 
rates, precisely on the same plan by which free motion 
travels with an endless band or with a swinging hammer 
or any other part of a machine whose utility consists in 
transferring energy to any place where it can be made 
available. There needs only the adaptation of distance 
between particle and particle ; and this the ether particles 
would establish among themselves, as the particles of our 
atmosphere succeed in doing under all varieties of con- 
ditions, and as any gas confined in a limited space can 
always succeed in doing for itself whether the quantity of 
gas admitted be more or less. The mode of ether trans- 
mission of light and heat would then differ only in this — 
that ether vibrations have no complications of tensions, 
but are presumably simply atomic ; and their vibrators 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 121 

are enough in number and so adapted to the free energies 
radiated by the sun that all modes of free energy can be 
forwarded with equal facility. 

In studying the phenomena of complementary colors, of 
after images, etc., it is impossible not to suppose that 
while some colors in the spectrum of light come down to 
us by the aid of direct or homologous A vibrators, their 
complementaries may be sent onward by the comple- 
mentary or B vibrators, and that this fact gives some 
suggestion as to the nature and cause of their respective 
but related properties. If ether rhythmic systems do 
exist as individual correlated systems, energizing in rela- 
tions of a strictly determinate extensiveness, wave motion, 
simultaneously ingoing and outgoing from the node of 
the system, would be as effective as in all denser systems. 

It would be unwise to be beguiled into a consideration 
of too many possible details of supposable differences in 
specific methods of energy transmission. We wish only 
to point out the possible ways in which all energies may 
be transmitted, as all modes of free motion may be 
generated, by the differentiated co-operations of persist- 
ing vibratory systems of motion — all constituted on 
radically the same plan of innate correlation. 

The earth's atmosphere, and many denser bodies, as 
already noted, transmit certain modes of energy to which 
they are adapted, without any perceptible transformation 
of the travelling energy. The energy received is supposed 
to enable the receivers to make proper contact with ele- 
ments like themselves ; vibrating along lines continuous 
with their own. Slight molecular, repulsions would restore 
enough tension to the giving system, and the receiver 
could hand on the energy without break in the working 
continuity of any part. By this interpretation all states of 
matter, while practically continuous, are actually discon- 
tinuous. The theory explains that class of facts which 
have remained perplexing mysteries — such as the nearly 



122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

frictionless revolutions of planets and other celestial 
voyagers. The comparatively slow progress of solids, 
translated through fluids whose primary systems are dis- 
sociated or comparatively dissociated and have wellnigh 
infinitely rapid vibrations, could evidently be made 
almost, possibly with some mutual adjustments, entirely 
without friction. 

Atmospheric disturbances on the earth, such as winds 
and counter-currents where vibratory systems are them- 
selves in translation, do interfere with the transmission 
of radiated energy ; and in our atmosphere, with its 
acquired condensation, there is always friction. Dust- 
laden air reflects, turns aside the lines of progression, and 
air laden with moisture or other appropriating impurities, 
absorbs portions of the heat rather than transmits it. In 
these and many similar cases fact and theory prove to be 
mutual interpreters. 

Light may be thrown on the subject if we directly 
study the process of generation and radiation in a body 
increasingly heated to a higher and higher temperature. 

The sun radiates heat and light of all kinds as freely 
as the ether transmits all kinds. But it is admitted that 
the radiating matter is, in a fluid condition, so highly 
dynamic in action that the outflow or overflow of free 
motion is but the speeding of surplus energy from the 
insensible parts of the radiating mass, to be taken up by 
other insensible parts of the transmitting medium. So it 
appears that heat and light in situ and heat and light in 
transitu are the same modes of free motion, but in co- 
operation with different vibrators. If it were not in 
excess, or if there were no tension-forming to banish it, 
the energy might remain indefinitely with the vibratory sys- 
tem where it was generated and where it would maintain 
itself in due balance with the tensions of its own system. 

We can only speculate about just why the sun is so 
freely a radiator of light and heat. But here on the 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 1 23 

earth we can generate heat and light by combustion and 
in various other ways, and gradually communicating this 
heat to a mass with which we wish to experiment, we can 
test the beautiful, composite, and yet separately lineal 
process of radiation, from its first beginning in a body 
heated gradually to a higher and higher temperature. 

Only the heat rays can begin to radiate before the 
body is red-hot. One after another in orderly succession, 
beginning with the red, the colors of the visible spectrum 
send out their continuous lines of differentiated vibra- 
tions, till, when the heated substance is glowing with 
white heat, they are all there, a compact multitude — 
each line in its own place, manifesting its own modes. 
By using the adapted means it can be separated from all 
the others and studied by itself. They all go on trans- 
mitting together, each its own type of free motion, with- 
out interference with each other. The longer vibrators, 
being the soonest charged with surplus heat, begin to 
radiate as soon as their temperature is higher than their 
environment. The shorter vibrations are not yet able to 
come in contact with neighboring vibrations of their own 
type. Their tensions are gradually loosened, they stretch 
outward, till, at each elongation they touch the next 
neighbor on the same line, and hand over the evolved 
motion. The same motion enables the next to transmit 
to its successor en route, and complex full radiation is 
established. 

That a large amount of work remains to be done in 
successfully unravelling the complete phenomenon of 
radiation, as it becomes sensible under different condi- 
tions, is obvious. In solids at white heat, with their 
complicated tensions stubbornly resisting dissociation, 
the visible spectrum seems continuous ; with the un- 
loosening of bonds, physical and chemical, special modes 
peculiar to the different substances begin to be manifest 
with their definite characteristics. 



124 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Taking the theory of the rhythmic atom as a working 
hypothesis, its assumptions certainly can be either proved 
or disproved in connection with the phenomena of light 
and other molecular manifestations. If primary units 
are vibratory about a common centre of gravity, if 
vibrators in the same system differ amongst themselves 
in modes and functions, in place and length of vibratory 
paths, in proportions of motion and tension, and in 
amounts of energy, — all this must practically help in 
unravelling the nature of physical and chemical com- 
pounding, the nature of gaseous, liquid, and solid physical 
states, the nature of absorption, radiation, and transmis- 
sion of energy ; it must help in clearly fathoming the 
nature of the differentiated energies themselves and of 
their several modes of progression. Briefly, then, the 
hypothesis claims to be, not a dead, but a living test of 
Nature and her methods. 

Every body radiates the same kinds of heat and light 
which it absorbs, because it neither gives nor takes any 
form of energy not adjusted to its own vibratory modes, 
which, under all like conditions, have an established char- 
acter of their own. With new relationships, when it is 
itself modified, it is concerned in evolving, absorbing, or 
radiating equally differentiated modes. The study of 
these suggestive relationships, if duly tested and repu- 
diated or verified, — not of course in the supposed details 
of method, which are but rough attempts to make clear the 
thought of both writer and reader, but as to the princi- 
ple of an ever co-operative relativity in every process, 
— must lead to positive and important results. 

All energies, static and dynamic, free motions or bound 
tensions — including electricity, gravitation, and mass-trans- 
lations, — being equally correlative, can be defined only by 
means of all co-operative terms. One aspect of any pro- 
cess, though it be the one most obtrusive and patent to 
the senses, is only calculated to mislead. 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 1 25 

Heat is a mode of motion, but if it were the mode in 
which entire systems as wholes, whether atoms, molecules, 
or larger masses, are made to vibrate, the presumption is, 
as upheld by our entire experience in the action and pro- 
duction of motion, the hot atoms, molecules, or larger 
masses could only vibrate as in some way anchored to 
yet larger systems of which they formed but parts. But 
we know that heat is the motion of insensible parts of the 
bodies heated ; it is a resultant, then, of the oppositely 
directed energizing of the parts of one and the same small 
mass. Like all other co-operations, the immediate asso- 
ciation is between special modes in opposition — not be- 
tween whole systems as such. 

Sound is apparently widely unlike heat and light in 
origin, in methods of work, and in the manner of its trans- 
ference, yet we may find reason for concluding that it 
is really very closely akin. It also is a molecular agitation 
of some kind ; but because it is so easily originated by 
the movements and collisions of visible tensions, and is 
accompanied by sensible movement of particles, and has 
comparatively slow rates in ordinary transmission, a cer- 
tain coarseness of character is often attached to it as a 
special mode of energy. 

The blow of one moving body on another at rest or in 
motion, as a hammer striking an anvil, produces sound ; 
but the character of the sound is much less determined 
by the force of the blow than by the molecular constitu- 
tion of the striking bodies. Some portion of the power 
represented in the blow is transformed into the molecular 
vibration, sound ; and this unique mode of vibration is 
then diffused and in some manner conveyed, or rather 
assisted in projecting itself, in all directions. The ham- 
mer, striking with equal blows a stone, a block of wood, 
a ball of putty, will produce very unlike sound-reactions. 
Each body is characteristic in its response — metals ringing 
each with a voice of its own, most other things giving 



126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

but a dull thud and converting the received motion largely 
into heat. 

Most musical sounds are not produced by obvious 
collision, but still they are transformed mass-vibrations 
somehow converted into molecular sound-vibrations, pre- 
sumably through contact, direct or indirect, of the giving 
and receiving vibrators. Sound is nearly if not quite 
always initiated by some kind of mass or tension move- 
ment ; and in its diffusion, except in special cases, it is 
accompanied, and its transference is promoted in part, by 
mass-motion. Thus a tuning-fork, thrown into sensible 
vibrations by outside force, has set up within it two sorts 
of movement : one, a mass-swing to-and-fro, pendulum- 
like ; the other a new molecular increase and modifica- 
tion — let us say — of elongations, into which the mass- 
translation is in part converted. This last, the evolved 
sound, is radiated in all directions. The initial sensible 
vibration — a tension phenomenon, — gradually trans- 
formed into sound and into other modes, comes to 
apparent rest. 

The theory, mindful of the phenomena of successive 
condensations and rarefactions in the transmitting atmos- 
phere, interprets the facts by supposing that, as in all 
other mass-translation, a part of the onward mass-motion 
is communicated to the surrounding atmospheric mole- 
cules with which it comes in contact ; that they are bodily 
shoved off a little way against other neighbors, and they 
against others, until the crowding produces a reaction, 
when they return to their places, to repeat a like process. 
At the same time the new mode — sound, — a free motion 
of infinitesimal vibrators, is sent forward from molecule to 
molecule on the same principle of contact by which heat 
is transmitted — the difference being that when heat is 
transferred the transmitting systems may remain centrally 
at rest, while in sound-transmission they are swayed to and 
fro by sensible pushes and pulls in which they themselves 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 1 27 

and the sounding body are mutually co-operative, as 
moving masses. 

Molar and molecular modes jointly produce and jointly 
transmit ordinary sound, but heat and light of higher 
grades are wholly molecular phenomena. In their radia- 
tion there are no appreciable alternating densities, but 
much evidence that the transfer is effected by simple 
vibratory co-operation. The sensible, so-called " sound 
waves " must literally be but waves of ordinary matter in 
translation like water waves driven by winds or tidal 
action. 

In the transmission of sound by elastic solids the effect 
is modified, and is regulated by the elasticity of the body 
as related to its density. But by the rhythmic theory 
elasticity is an expression for the relative amount of 
vibratory freedom still retained by the tensions which 
constitute the elastic substance. An elastic body is one 
so compounded that there is a good deal of internal 
alternation of wave action oppositely directed among the 
complex tensions themselves. Hence the vibratory con- 
tacts are probably efficiently aided by the tension swing, 
which may be compared to the movement of a playing 
shaft. The swing of all tensions, as translated tension, is 
comparatively slow and feeble. But sound, moving along 
an electric circuit, travels with the speed of electricity. 
Its transit is no longer in part mass-progress, but wholly 
ongoing along closed vibratory lines. If it leave the 
circuit and is again forwarded by ordinary methods, it 
reverts to the usual rates of speed ; its progress depends 
not upon itself, but upon its co-workers. 

Sound proper, with whatever conditions it may be 
associated, is held to be itself purely molecular vibration. 
In ordinary transference, each receiving molecule is pushed 
bodily forward a little way, and, at the same time, the 
sound-receiving vibrations within the molecule, being some- 
what elongated by their quota of added free motion, are 



128 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

enabled to transfer the surplus, through contact, to vibra- 
tions of their own class. The lines of sound are thus in 
effect as continuous as lines of light, or of electricity in 
radiation — the difference being that the atomic or molecu- 
lar centres of the medium are sensibly at rest when 
electricity, light, and heat are radiated, but are demonstra- 
bly moved to and fro when sound is en route by ordinary 
conveyances. 

The unlike modes may be illustrated by the transfer of 
buckets passed along by two rows of people stationed at 
equal distances apart — one row composed of long-armed 
men, the other of short-armed boys. Each man, by ex- 
tending one arm, takes the bucket, transfers it to the 
other hand, and, reaching in the opposite direction, hands 
it to his neighbor, while his feet remain immovable. 
But every short-armed boy must run a little one way to 
receive the bucket, and a little the other way to give it up 
at the right position. Thus the transfer of buckets along 
this row is effected in part by the extending arms, but in 
part by the to-and-fro movement of the whole boy. The 
buckets themselves make a continuous progress along 
both lines, and the actual transfer is effected from hand 
to hand along an unbroken line. 

If the theory can be sustained, the true sound pulsations 
have not been actually measured or estimated. They are 
recognized by no sense except that of hearing. The 
vibratory mechanism of the ear may be supposed, in re- 
ceiving the sound pulses, at least in part to reconvert 
them into tension-vibration, — very much as the remote 
diaphragm of a telephone repeats the vibrations of the 
diaphragm set in motion by the voice of the speaker. On 
this supposition there would be repeated transformations 
of the travelling energy, but all energies being modes of 
motion, transformations in mode mean nothing more 
than change in copartners — with their different ways 
of co-operating, — involving a difference in the mode of 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 1 29 

response. The change from one mode to another is as 
simple as change of form to a pliant substance ready to 
be moulded to any new configuration. 

The densest bodies, with tensions however closely 
knitted, cannot be supposed to have their primary free- 
dom wholly transformed to modes so tensely interlocked 
that there is no to-and-fro play of the primal movements ; 
their not directly combined but associated vibrators, 
though sharing in the increase of stress because of their 
intra-atomic correlations, must yet be measurably free to 
respond to sound or to any other free motion — taking on 
any type of added elongation. Thus the same energy 
communicated to a condensed body, especially to one 
which, because of its form and condition, like that of a 
tense string, or a thin plate, or air crowded into a limited 
space, can be easily moved while yet it is so held that it 
cannot be removed from its place, — the same energy of 
whatever kind must both start the tensions into tension- 
vibration and freer parts associated with the tensions into 
increased molecular vibration. 

The freer elements absorb the free motion until such 
time as they are able to begin to radiate it by successive 
contacts and exchanges on lines of radiation continuous 
with their own. Sound, being generated from the slow trans- 
lations of tensions, is a far weaker energy than heat, except 
that of a low grade. Unless helped onward, it becomes 
rapidly transformed into other modes. The vocal organs 
are the most wonderfully facile generators of differenced 
sounds. Like the stretched chords of musical instru- 
ments, they can be made to vibrate at will, and the sound 
generated depends upon the length, the tenseness, and 
other properties of the vibrating tensions, and the rate of 
vibration as well as its amplitude. Somewhat such dif- 
ferences apparently distinguish one color from another in 
the light spectrum. The elongation of a vibrator when 

no free motion is in transit may be compared to the 
9 



130 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

stretching of a chord : the transverse wavelets are the 
lateral curves which run on at definite intervals along the 
length ; and it is the diversity in these which determines 
the color of each ray. 

The onflow of free energy remains unchanged with its 
new tensions, provided these are of the same vibratory 
class ; but the vibrations of chords and of thin plates only 
awaken in their inherent molecules responsive oscillations 
— presumably far more rapid than the rhythmic tension- 
play itself. Sound is not the successive sensible rhythm 
of the vibrating body. It must have molecular rapidity. 
Though whenever and however it is acted upon it must 
become modified accordingly, it yet remains an atomic or 
a molecular rhythm. If tension-vibration were itself the 
real objective sound, the same conditions and the same 
vibratory pulsations in non-sounding bodies would become 
sound ; and all sounding bodies, conditioned and acted 
upon in the same way, would give out the same sounds, 
which they are very far from doing. 

The imposed conditions, with communicated motion as 
initiative, stimulate the insensible parts to an increase of 
their own proper action. Thus the near diaphragm of the 
telephone vibrates both as a thin plate and as a group of 
molecules whose parts are adapted to sound vibrations. 
En route, the vibrations are purely molecular, at the far 
diaphragm a tension-quiver is once more resumed, then 
the atmosphere transmits both to the ear, but in the 
brain the sound again may be purely molecular. The 
sentient side of sound is not now under consideration. 

As men utilize the best-adapted substances in the con- 
struction of their various machines, choosing the right 
quantities and forms of the most desirable kinds, and put- 
ting them together in ways which insight or experience 
teaches to be most effective, by the same practical plan mu- 
sicians construct violins, flutes, pianos, organs — each choos- 
ing the materials best adapted to their purposes. In the 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 131 

action of one mass upon another the co-operations and the 
effects are apparently visible throughout — the sensible 
changes being " motion in the lump," and molecular mo- 
tion, motion in detail ; but their transformations of modes 
are similar in kind. 

Friction, which is partial arrest, converts mass-motion 
into heat, or into sound, indifferently. Heat of a low- 
grade is produced by the obstructed working of all ma- 
chines, and, with adapted materials, sound is generated at 
the same time, or, the outcome may be sound rather than 
heat. All free motions, except that of bodily translation, 
being vibrations of semi-detached infinitesimal parts, sound, 
like heat and light, is of many distinct varieties. It be- 
longs to the grade of vibrations to which the hearing 
responds, as the eye responds to light, and the sensation 
of warmth to heat ; and there are sounds to which the 
human ear does not respond without artificial help, as 
there is light to which the eye is insensible. 

The several energies differ from each other in much the 
same way that the different kinds of light differ amongst 
themselves. The vibrations — chiefly it is presumed vibra- 
tions tranverse to the line of propagation — differ in rates 
and in dimensions. With light these diversities become 
sensibly demonstrable. 

Why, then, is it asked, is not sound propagated as rap- 
idly as light and heat ? For the same reason that light is 
not radiated from a heated body until it has become red- 
hot, although non-luminous heat is radiated long before 
this. Why does the red light begin to radiate first, then 
the other colors of the spectrum in gradation, until at white 
heat they are all in full and harmonious flow together? 

We have already answered, in effect, that it may be be- 
cause the feebler vibrators must receive large reinforce- 
ments of free motion before their vibrations can become 
enough elongated to come in contact with others of their 
own kind, moving upon the same paths, to whom they 



I32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

can transfer the surplus free motion. It is only then 
when an unbroken line can be established along this 
special path, that the radiation of this special kind of 
light or sound can begin. In the ordinary radiation of 
sound the stimulus is so weak that sound vibrations cannot 
connect unless the entire particle, by moving also, enables 
them to meet. The method is different from that by 
which the light vibrations are enabled to connect, but the 
essential fact is identical. 

In an ordinary atmosphere, with its two unlike elements 
and various impurities, doubtless there is enough repul- 
sion between equal vibrations, meeting before the full 
elongation of each, to keep the density of the various 
strata about what they now are. It is only when there 
is energy to be transmitted one way and nothing to corre- 
spond en route the opposite way, that an energy like 
sound, heat, or light can travel on unresisted ; but such 
an energy, starting from a given point, by division, may 
travel outward on every side on as many separate lines 
as are adapted to transmit it to any point where it can be 
taken up and absorbed or transformed. 

It is such outraying in all directions, with corresponding 
movement of particles, which makes the so-called " shells 
of rarefaction and condensation " in the atmosphere, under 
the influence of sound. The reaction returns the particles 
to their original positions, assisted doubtless by the repul- 
sion of other opposed vibrators. Briefly, then, it is 
adaptation — often no doubt variously complicated — be- 
tween the elements of the comparatively free motion 
systems which enables them to send forward any free 
energy which may come to them from an actively 
radiating body. 

All free motion is not radiated ; it beats to and fro 
between equally active vibrators or is slowly passed 
onward from point to point, as with ordinaiy heat, the 
hotter body slowly cooling and the cooler one as slowly 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 1 33 

becoming equalized in heat. The heat of friction, not 
often sensibly radiated, may be made to radiate by 
fitting adjustments for rapid transmission ; but in general 
it remains with the tensions, raising their temperature 
and expanding them in the directions of transmission 
until it is evenly distributed. 

Sound, which is generated in nearly the same manner 
with the heat arising from small frictions, if too feeble 
to radiate, remains inaudible in the vicinity of the 
producing tensions. Sometimes it can be made audible 
by artificial means. Sound transmission, then, is a 
modified type of radiation, in which a species of con- 
vection coincides and co-operates with the distinctively 
radiative process. But a musician often believes him- 
self to be the direct producer of a given melody. 
As a boy by throwing a stone knocks an apple from the 
tree, so the musician produces the melody. But the 
stone gives the direct blow, and gravity pulls down 
the apple ; and swaying tensions — wonderful magicians 
that they are — transform tame, soundless motion into 
many-voiced melody ; they give to each tone its first 
impulse to move out into the broader world. 

The entire process being rigidly mathematical at every 
step, in every detail, the initiative means seem fully to 
include the desired end. They do so as much but no 
more than the taking of food comprehends the subse- 
quent processes of nutrition, tissue-building, and strength- 
giving, about which we know little and can directly do 
nothing whatever. Studying the more and less whole- 
someness of foods and drinks, the amounts and condi- 
tions under which they can be best assimilated, we can 
indirectly build up or pull down physical vigor. The 
skilful musician creates delightful harmony, the unskil- 
ful, discord, — but by like indirect applied knowledge. 
The parent adds a cubit to his child's stature only by 
supplying Nature's builders with the raw material — food ; 



134 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

the musician adds another symphony only by supplying 
Nature's always rhythmic motions with the crude motion 
out of which they evolve almost infinite variations of lively 
or soft and slumberous sounds. The artist manipulates 
his fettered, tangible masses ; the vibrators do the rest, 
as they do in the photographic art. As assuredly* as 
Nature builds up her new substances by the delicate 
re-combining of elementary parts which the chemist can 
only helplessly bring together in his retort, so does she 
evolve her wondrous voices as quickened thrills and 
quivers woven from the silent motion directly evoked 
by the artist. 

Nature reserves to herself as ample a share in the sweet 
craft of music-making, as she does in fashioning the ear 
and the brain of the hearer. In both cases we utilize her 
mechanisms ; we fashion neither. We can measure the 
indirect vibrations which produce sound ; we have not 
yet measured the sound vibrations. A deaf man can 
feel the one, he cannot hear the other. The sensible 
phenomena which everywhere accompany both the pro- 
duction and the transmission of sound must be dis- 
criminated and eliminated from our definitions of sound 
itself. They are motions ; they are rhythmic motions, 
rythmically produced. But they are not sound. 

Sound is a special kind of rhythmic motion, and, like 
heat, light, electricity, and chemical co-operation, as an 
active process, it must be mechanically evolved. Our 
methods are but the preliminary steps by which we 
set in motion the adapted machinery for evolving the 
desired tone. The structure and rhythm of the primary 
atoms and their special modes of inter-atomic co-opera- 
tion decide the character and variety of differentiated 
sounds, precisely as much as they decide the differences 
in the colored rays of light. 

Because we can see and feel the vibrations of the tun- 
ing-fork, can count the beats and set them going by our 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 1 35 

own act ; because the maker of the fork can so construct 
it that it shall vibrate in any key which he predetermines, 
it has been supposed that the initiatory process, the 
number of sensible beats which evoke the molecular 
rhythm, is the actual sound (objectively considered). 
It would be as legitimate to suppose that, because men 
can build a ship of steel and can guide it whither they 
will by steam, that the innate strength of the steel 
depends upon the form and size of the craft, and the 
power of the steam upon the way in which the engineer 
directs its activity for the furtherance of his own ends. 

But the conclusive evidence that sound is not some 
given number of countable wave-beats, and is composed 
of the vibrations neither of a sensible mass nor yet of an 
entire swaying atom or molecule, but is a true intra- 
atomic rhythm, is the fact that a whisper into the tele- 
phone can travel scores of miles with lightning speed, and 
present itself at the far end of the route almost unchanged, 
and as perfect, as distinct, and as characteristic in every 
tone as are the different colors in a beam of light. It is 
totally unthinkable that any possible mass-vibration, or any 
complication of mass-vibrations, or any conceivable com- 
position of translatory motions could either produce or 
could carry forward results like these. Helpful vibratory 
parts are a necessity. 

The same quantity of light, heat, or of ordinary elec- 
tricity — wonderfully effective as sound — makes no sensi- 
ble impression, upon the transmitting circuit, and awakens 
no felt response in our sensations. Sound, with its most 
charming variety of notes, high and low and ranging 
through a widely comprehensive scale, seems to be a more 
delicate vibratory process than even magical light itself. 
A sharp blow upon a flint can barely strike out its visible 
spark, but one feeble twang of a tuning-fork awakens a 
succession of sound reverberations ; and, as we know, a 
whispered sentence, with its dozen differenced tones, under 



136 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

adapted conditions can propagate itself almost indefinitely. 
There must be the actual transfer of the sound-forms in 
an unbroken continuity. But one word may combine a 
dozen tones, and of a thousand words not one need be an 
exact echo of its predecessor ; yet every nice distinction 
of change, every weakest quiver or strain, phase by phase, 
must move onward in an unbroken phalanx. This curious 
procession of invisible shivers is communicated from one 
substance to another apparently quite dissimilar, and to 
yet another and another — colloids, solids, and gases, — yet 
they each take up the same musical cadences and faith- 
fully transmit them essentially unchanged. 

Every vibrator, along each line of the whole varied 
course through which the sounds travel, must have a 
mechanism ethereal and flexible enough in structure to 
repeat the particular quiver allotted to it, with every 
attendant ripple of undulation, with essential accuracy. 
Something of a thicker, tinkling, metallic utterance sup- 
plants the softer, more musical tones, telling us that 
metals have their own distinctive modes of free motions 
and tensions, with something less of pliancy than colloids 
and gases, even when they repeat the same motion-forms ; 
but they add their testimony to the fact that they literally 
do repeat — do each in succession receive and transmit — 
the special sound waves especially adapted to themselves. 

We recognize in ourselves a difference of feeling which 
somehow gives a distinct birth to each different tone. 
Our vocal organs are pliant machines, so delicate that they 
respond in turn to every shade and grade of feeling ; 
nothing except rhythmic vibratory pulses of motion, dis- 
tinct and periodic in action and meeting along continuous 
lines of progression over which the sound-forms move, as 
visible water-forms move onward under the eye, is ade- 
quate to produce the transference of sound at electrical 
rates of speeds. 

A snail must carry his load at his own pace, and 50 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 1 37 

must an electric current. Along the closed circuit, 
sound must travel at the normal rates of that circuit ; but 
in the open air, where every helping particle must take 
its own small forward journey, their rates of progression 
largely determine the progress of the sound, although the 
real sound vibrations must have the same time for the 
same tone under all conditions. 

The electric field of force is in itself sufficiently 
stimulating to enable sound waves to travel uninterrup- 
tedly. Here there is no need of the intervention of mov- 
ing particles, as in all transfer by the help of gases, nor is 
there in a solid conductor an initiative tension-impulse 
adapted to produce translatory motion. The conductor 
is so related to outside stimulus that it usually gains 
rather than loses energy en route. The electric mode of 
energy transference may be compared to the conduction 
by the atmosphere, but in a closed tube of polished metal 
which prevents all lateral escape and which, by its reflec- 
tions, actually helps also in the transfer. But there are 
still other causes of the rapid action of an electric current, 
which will be treated of in the chapter on electricity. 

Every sound travels with the wind at an accelerated 
rate, and against the wind at a retarded rate. It also 
travels a little faster at a high temperature, other things 
equal, than at a low one ; and when the sound is made 
by a violent collision which throws the whole atmosphere 
into commotion — with great waves of rapid translation 
which can jar houses and break glass miles away, — the 
sound transference must be more rapid and more violent 
than usual. 

That sound will not travel through a vacuum or in air 
extremely rarefied is hardly a sufficient reason for con- 
cluding that no sound vibrations accompany light and 
heat as radiated from the sun. We only know that 
there is no sound coming with the other modes which is 
audible to our ears. We do not know that the stimula- 



138 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

tion of the accompanying light and heat may not evolve 
sounds which are outside of our sound spectrum, as we 
do know that there are vibratory radiations of light which 
are outside of our light spectrum. Nor do we know 
that the bell put in vibration in vacuo produces no ob- 
jective sound ; we only know that there is no subjective 
response in our sensations. 

Our assumption is that all free motion may pertain to 
the same atomic system of many vibrators, and that 
with any arrest, from whatever cause, the free energy 
travels on to other tensions, and that we interpret it 
as light, as heat, as sound, as electricity, according to 
its methods of working or of manifesting itself to our 
special sensations. 

Sir Henry Roscoe, in his inaugural address before 
the British Association at Manchester, says suggestively ; 
" The structure of the smallest particle, invisible even 
to our most searching vision, may be as complicated as 
that of any one of the heavenly bodies which circle 
round the sun." 

An atom of active rhythmic co-operations, though it be 
not a microcosm in its complexity, if it is the unit of all 
tensions, should be also the unit of all free motions. The 
to-and-fro swaying of particles en masse can never be 
made to explain the great variety of sounds. What shall 
be said then where the same atmosphere permits heat 
and light of every kind to stream freely onward, aided 
or hindered by its co-operation? We can only assume 
that the ultimate particles of such an atmosphere must 
be themselves complex and differentiated in the activities 
of their several parts. The delicacy and ready responsive- 
ness of the adapted portions of the least particles seem 
to be beyond question. 

Is hearing the grossest of our senses, or is it the most 
subtle, the most acute, — the sense which is able to catch 
the slightest of the intra-molecular quivers of change ? 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 1 39 

According to Professor Tait, the sound which will carry 
in a telephone is only about one thousand millionth 
part as much in quantity as the ordinary electric current 
used in telegraphing. In experimenting, with the hope 
of establishing a sound telephone, Mr. Bell, assuming 
that the energy in use was quite insufficient to do the 
required work, discovered by mere chance that the desired 
sounds were easily and actually to be heard at the remote 
distance, to his unbounded astonishment and delight. 

Sound, the coarse and clumsy energy that tradition 
has labelled it ! Every baby on its first advent into the 
world is able to set all the echoes into discordant chiming. 
A little later, its laugh is music for the gods ; but what 
other energy can it so promptly call into vigorous action ? 

To hearken, at all times, is to hear. Nature's voices 
are never at rest. Attention is more continuously re- 
warded by sound than by any other sensation, and even 
the noises can be unravelled into a many-voiced music. 
We are at present dealing only with the external causes 
of sound and other phenomena, with the physical side of 
Nature, yet the sentient side, with its more and less con- 
sciously directive interferences, is a most important factor 
in all cognition of external changes. In the processes of 
perceiving and knowing, as in all other complicated pro- 
cesses, operation is co-operation. It is simply a blunder 
in inference to assume that the perceived and tested 
vibrations which initiate any given note, or tone, or 
symphony are the direct producers of the sounds gene- 
rated. They are indirect causes. 

The ability to set up the needed agitations and to watch 
the process, after a manner, step by step until the respon- 
sive sounds are returned to the waiting ear in true correla- 
tion to the causes which were consciously impelled to 
produce them, seems to be proof positive that here are 
true causes and true effects. So indeed they are ; we 
only claim that the cycle of correlation is a much more 



140 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

comprehensive one than has generally been recognized, 
and that unless we include the awakened intra-molecular 
vibrations, which, responding to their adapted stimulus, 
send out to us their musical rhythms, which we really 
recognize as the many-voiced sound, we fail to adequ- 
ately interpret Nature's admirable reciprocity in the pro- 
duction of musical harmonies. 

When the electrician generates electricity by rubbing a 
vitreous surface with a differenced resinous surface, he 
infers that there is some relation between the elements of 
the two surfaces which generates the electrical effects and 
separates the opposed electricities. He has not made 
the mistake of supposing that the to-and-fro passes with 
their friction are anything more than the needful stimulus 
adapted to arouse these differenced elements into a co- 
operation special to themselves. He has found out that 
one of these two surfaces, if made to rub against a third 
and differenced substance from either, may exactly reverse 
the electrical effects, and he concedes that non-sensible 
energies are set to work indeed by the friction which he 
puts into operation, but that they work after their own 
methods, over which he has no direct control. 

The art of the .musician is like that of the electrician. 
He has discovered a complicated series of frictional passes 
by means of which he can awaken the desired musical 
notes at will, but the musician has mistaken the adapted 
stimulus which he has learned to command for the 
response which Nature's molecular vibrators return to him 
with promptness. 

Or again, the chemist may put the right proportion of 
elementary substances together to form the desired com- 
pound, but it is they who must do the actual work of 
co-operation in their own way. If they will not combine 
at ordinary temperatures, he may incite them to act, by 
adding the stimulus of heat or electricity. With like sub- 
stances, brought together in different proportions, perhaps 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 141 

with differing conditions, the chemist may indirectly pro- 
duce several compounds resembling each other somewhat 
in properties, but very definitely and numerically differen- 
tiated. Each is marked off from all of the others with as 
much exact mathematical precision in their relative com- 
bining ratios and proportions as is found to exist in the 
related notes of a musical scale. 

In the one case, as in the other, we must fall back upon 
the modified vibratory co-operations as the actual ultimate 
causes of the resulting phenomena. There are more inter- 
mediate steps between the chemist and his foreknown and 
intended compounds, and the work done is less under his 
direct attention ; but he, as really and in the same sense, 
evokes his new substances into being, as the musician does 
his musical composition. Both work indirectly, availing 
themselves of Nature's forces, who do the work for them 
under their rational direction ; and at the final stage 
of the work, the forces in both cases are not molar but 
molecular. 

Nature is nothing if not mathematical. Because the 
middle C of a musical scale can be called into being by 
a certain number of wave-beats of rhythmic motion, and 
because the higher C and the lower C stand related to it, 
each in its own definite way, is not at all a good reason 
for the assumption that these sounds are literally com- 
posed of the sensible vibrations, or waves of successive 
motions, which the musical performer calls into action. 

When we look further we find that the musical instru- 
ment adapted to generate the sounds has been so fash- 
ioned that whatever note is excited is able at once to 
reinforce itself by a united volume of the same sound 
called up from the depths of the sonorous material of the 
instrument itself. What is this fulness of response, if not 
the molecular symphony of multitudes of vibrators, all 
moving in simultaneous harmony ? The musical string, 
without its background of sonorous reinforcement, can no 



142 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

more make itself heard than the light or heat vibrations 
of any substance could make themselves seen and felt if 
they were not banded together as a great company. By 
all moving in a unison of infinitesimal rhythms, they gain 
recognition through our co-operative senses and their 
attendant sensations. 

The clumsy sounding-boards suspended at the back of 
the high pulpits of our fathers were not merely the reflec- 
tors of sound ; they re-echoed, reinforced, and prolonged 
the tones, as admirably as a microphone can increase 
inaudible sounds till they become audible. Every good 
acoustical hall of scientific structure does the same to-day. 
The fine qualities of every musical instrument are pre- 
cisely graduated by their capability at once of reinforcing 
and of freely radiating every sonorous change. No other 
energy, not even that of a grateful warmth, is so delight- 
fully contagious as that of sound ! 

It is proverbial that a well-trained, good instrument, 
which has been long played upon by a master, can give 
fuller, richer, finer, mellower tones than a new and untried 
one, though the latter by practice may become the better 
of the two. A violin which for years has echoed the fine 
melodies of a master is a priceless treasure. The strings 
are only the door-sills, easily worn and renewed. But 
every atom in the little temple of harmony has become 
attuned to its own highest perfection — has nicely re-ad- 
justed the complicated rhythm of its vibrations to the 
kindred vibrations of its neighbors, till all have become 
ready together to do their utmost in harmony. 

Even a symmetrical crystal will sometimes re-arrange 
itself to still better advantage, as it finds time quietly to 
adjust and adapt its many inherent processes each to all. 
In the hurry of crystallization there is the crowding of many 
small and, without the sustenance of a common back- 
ground, very imperfect crystals ; but if the process is steady 
and long in maturing, the crystals are larger and more 



LIGHT, HEAT, AND SOUND. 1 43 

self-sufficient in their perfection. The less desirable have 
been known to fall asunder and to re-arrange themselves 
in a broader consonance with the more desirable. So 
Nature, through all her structures, endlessly weaving a 
faultlessly balanced web of changes, is yet often able to 
readapt a still better from an already good. All of her 
improvements are made by very small installments. So 
it is that, when a master plays admirably upon even the 
door-sill of the temple of melody, he is seconding Nature, 
who presently gives back to him a still higher recompense. 

What can facts like these signify, unless they point 
directly to the rhythmic intermolecular character of 
sound ? The dancing and rearranging of rigid bodies is 
a most insufficient explanation of the facts, though we 
should never so carefully number their oscillations and 
multiply them in their possible complexity. That any 
number of movements in atoms or molecules as wholes 
can explain the complexity of sound is an impossibility. 

The confused and often discordant clangor of mere 
noise, arising without an orderly genesis such as appre- 
ciative minds have learned to evoke in musical utterances, 
is mere accident accompanying many otherwise highly 
utilized co-operations. These jargons of sound are sel- 
dom appreciated, unless it be by the small boys of the 
vicinity. Perhaps in -time the makers and the users of 
machinery may learn to recognize the value of harmoni- 
ously pitched machines, constructed upon a sound basis ; 
and they may find that it is entirely possible to add desir- 
able musical qualities to the other capabilities of their 
many marvellous inventions. 

It must be admitted that in the attempted explanations 
of musical and other sounds, many very positive state- 
ments are not always in accord with any well-considered, 
distinct theory. The real meaning of many teachers may 
very easily be misunderstood, if indeed their words are 
the symbols of really distinct thoughts. If the writer has 



144 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 



misapprehended the statements of many scientific author- 
ities, who seem to hold the opinion that sound, like all 
other modes of motion, is the movement of something, 
and not the movement in something, so much the better. 
It is desirable only to emphasize the hypothesis that all 
changes, whether of physical tensions or of free motions, 
are internal and not external phenomena. All modifica- 
tions arise within the substances modified ; hence, all 
atomic modifications arise within the atom. Heat, light, 
and sound are atomic modifications. 




ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. 

If we would intelligibly explain the what, the why, and 
the how — at least the conceivable what, why, and how — 
of electrical phenomena of many kinds, the theory of 
vibratory combinations and co-operations becomes ex- 
tremely fruitful and suggestive. 

Side-to-side unions of surface vibrators, of complementary 
phases, having like times, partially like directions, unlike 
amounts of dynamic force (difference of potential), 
room for transposed and polarized vibratory paths, with 
the assumed conversion of the motion of friction largely 
into electric tension, may throw some light upon frictional 
electricity and surface electric charge. Complementaries, 
dynamically unequal and brought together by combined 
pressure and motion, must accept ready displacement of 
vibratory paths, both for themselves and their allies, while 
yet atomic and mass equilibrium must be maintained. 
Electric tension is the result. But all tension is double- 
sided ; hence, two rubbed, electrified surfaces must be 
drawn apart against a felt resistance ; and while the non- 
visible vibrators of one surface are in their direct phases, 
those of the other are in their reverse phases. 

Difference of electric tension at adjacent places on a 
non-conductor would be explained by the required greater 
and less transpositions of normal vibratory paths. 

The dissociated vibrators of the opposed surfaces being 
on the one surface in elongation when on the other sur- 
face in retraction, and vice versa, though in identical times 

145 



I46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

and directions, this difference of a half beat explains the 
difference between positive and negative electricity. They 
differ in time and direction by a half vibration, as estimated 
by their homologous phases. 

When homologous phases (like electricities), having the 
same vibratory paths, meet face to face, wave-front to 
wave-front, or " end-on " collision, of course the result is 
mutual repulsion. 

But direct phases of one surface and reverse phases of 
the other, moving one way, and not on precisely identical 
lines — those having the greater potential extending past 
the others and combining with them side to side, — must 
send forward the surplus free motion, if in the neighbor- 
hood of a proper conductor — with a tendency to con- 
densation (attraction) ; or, in the absence of a conductor, 
must assume the static condition of electric tension. 

Assuming that all solids have free or readily decom- 
bined vibrators on their surfaces, invisible, but always 
found to be actively co-operative with the surrounding 
medium, then inter-atomic, side-to-side combinations 'of 
complementary vibrators — physical compounding — be- 
comes, entirely comprehensible. If two surfaces with 
difference in the dynamic energy of their uniting elements 
are thus brought together by means of friction — itself a 
free motion which all of the vibrators must absorb, but 
probably in such manner as to increase rather than diminish 
the difference of potential on the two surfaces, — if the 
vibrators of the two surfaces combine, as they must, the 
surplus energy of the more dynamic group must find an 
outlet of some kind. 

When either or both of the surfaces are conductors, the 
surplus free motion is readily transmitted elsewhere, and 
the whole matter is simple enough — so simple indeed that 
if all substances were conductors of the resulting unique 
electrical mode of motion, we probably should never have 
known the difference between dynamic electricity and 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. 1 47 

heat. Heat, as we know, is often generated under very 
nearly the same conditions as frictional electricity. It is 
only when the one surface's vibrators have a prepon- 
derance of free motion that co-operation between them 
produces electrical phenomena. 

But if the electrified substances are not conductors, 
and there is no conductor in the near neighborhood, 
then the co-operation between the unequal vibrators 
is in part transformed into electric tension on both 
surfaces, and in part it is taken by the surrounding 
medium, which is itself thrown into a tension of a special 
variety, but which also transmits a residue of the motion 
to some surface which becomes in its turn electrified by 
" induction." 

This is a complicated process, but perhaps not more so 
than that of many other co-operative transformations. 
It seems possible that one may gain an entirely thinkable 
apprehension of the progressive co-operation from first to 
last. With a clear idea of tensions, whatever their forms 
or specialties, as storages of force held in abeyance, and 
an equally clear conception of the character of the trans- 
mission of all free motion, which must everywhere accom- 
pany the establishment of tensions, if we can also apprehend 
what it is that manifestly distinguishes electrical and mag- 
netic phenomena from all other modes, there can be no 
further difficulty. That electricity and its closely allied 
and kindred magnetism are the most unique of all the 
known modes of motion every one will admit. But 
wherein lies their peculiarity ? 

If we turn to dynamics we find that radiated heat, light, 
and all similar energies can travel outward only in one 
general direction, but electricity can travel equally well 
either way around the closed circuit. Electricity travels 
also in only one general direction when it induces an 
opposite electrification in some other body. What, then, 
can there be in the nature of the closed circuit which 



148 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

enables it to do what no other medium, so far as is known, 
is able to accomplish ? 

Calling to mind the position that all manifestations of 
physical power are purely mechanical transformations in 
methods of joint action, note that electricity is uniformly 
generated whenever two bodies having a " difference of 
potential " are brought into close contact, and that, if the 
contact is accompanied by the active motion of friction, it 
is electricity which is freely generated — not chemical 
combination, with its change of physical properties, or 
heat (though some heat is evolved in the operation), or 
light, or any other of the more familiar energies. 

Then note that by the use of the proper appliances this 
energy, which can be separated into two differentiated 
electrical energies, can also be made to travel freely either 
way around the electric circuit ; but that the negative 
electricity must travel with the negative current, and the 
positive electricity with the positive current, or, as gen- 
erally expressed, with the current. There are methods 
by which electricians can make either current available 
for common purposes, as they can other free energies ; 
but with that we have nothing to do at present. 

By the theory the two electricities differ in time by a 
half beat of the electrified vibrators, so that the one elec- 
tricity must travel with vibrators whose wave-fronts face 
in one direction along the circuit, and the other in the 
reverse direction. As the surfaces where electricity begins 
to generate are unequal in their amounts of free motion, 
the process of conducting away the surplus begins in one 
direction rather than in both. This direction is called 
the direction of the current, and it indicates the 
course of the so-called " positive " free electricity. Does 
it not seem to be a necessary conclusion that a con- 
ductor is any body which is able to transmit free elec- 
tricity of both kinds either way in succession — the positive 
amount of energy being passed off in one direction and 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. 149 

the negative in the other with a reversed rhythm of 
transference ? 

In that case a non-conductor would be a body whose 
surface vibrators absorbed free energy, in some way trans- 
forming a portion of it into surface electric tension, but 
rejecting another portion which is borne off by the medium 
to do its further work of producing electric stress in other 
non-conductors. 

The electrified or closed circuit also has a pathway for 
the free energy in both directions, and may be said to be 
polarized both ways. But unless some way is found of 
returning a part of the travelling energy back to its start- 
ing point, or of replenishing the energy, so that an active 
current is in continuous circulation, the polarized elements 
become depolarized, or at any rate the circuit is broken 
and will no longer conduct. There is a mutual dependence, 
then, among the co-operative parts of every conductor, 
and they are only able to co-operate with the assistance 
of a free electricity which helps to establish its own path- 
way onward. Thus, in its progress, it at once assists and 
is assisted, so that like all co-operation the process is 
double-sided. 

Overcoming the resistance of a conductor may be in 
reality establishing the line of connection by elongating 
the vibrators, and perhaps displacing and re-arranging 
vibratory paths. At any rate electricity is a form of en- 
ergy which can help to make its own pathway, and to 
move in it when it is once established with a pertinacity 
which belongs to no •other energy. Its capacity for making 
its way through the earth or any other body which can 
possibly become useful for the purpose of completing a 
closed circuit is well-known. 

The closed circuit means a double polarization of direc- 
tions, which in itself indicates that there should be a cor- 
responding double-faced free motion, which sets out to 
travel in either direction until the circuit is completed, 



150 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

when it continues to circulate in a ceaseless round, unless 
the arrangement is otherwise disturbed, as by the diversion 
of the free energy into other channels or its transforma- 
tion into other modes. Electrification seems to arise 
from the necessity that all united vibrators shall in some 
way become equalized in the ratio of static to dynamic 
modes ; hence, the new adjustments originate both the 
electric displacements or polarization with increased ten- 
sion and free electricity. 

The unbalanced vibrators being brought into physical 
copartnership, if their inequality is but small, though a 
current may be started it rapidly ebbs away unless there 
is some source for the steady supply of dynamic energy. 
With such a supply and a closed circuit, though the cur- 
rent starts in one direction with every reversal of vibrators 
it flows also in the opposite direction with a balanced 
energy. Hence there is the " separation of electricities," 
and by proper mechanical contrivances the dynamic energy 
moving in either direction may be accumulated as tension 
or " electric charge," or sent anywhere through a proper 
conductor to do mechanical labor, while the other equal 
energy is conducted to earth and lost for present use. 

The weaker vibrators of a non-conductor, by absorbing 
energy from the others, are able to react upon the giving 
surface, but the joint action is probably attended with 
transposition and polarization in both phases — the result 
being a doubly polarized tension on either surface and the 
corresponding dispersion of motion, taken up by the 
medium as in part the displacement with tension for its 
own elements, and in part the special mode of free motion 
which it sends forward to some body which can be elec- 
trified by induction. 

Electric and magnetic dynamic modes are held to be 
closely akin to all other free motions — the difference 
being that they are so polarized that, given conductors 
similarly polarized, the one moiety of the energy travels 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. 151 

one way and the other with reversal of the conductors' 
vibrators the other way, while other free motions are 
usually adapted to travel with conductors in their normal 
conditions. 

Static electricity, or electrification, is a condition of 
balanced tensions polarized in opposed directions. The 
non-conductor can not and the conductor can keep 
currents of free electricity in circulation, but this differ- 
ence may be no greater than that between a transparent 
and an opaque body — the one being able to transmit the 
rays of light and the other not. The opaque body, like 
a non-conductor, absorbs some portion of the presented 
energy and reflects the remainder. But the electrified 
non-conductor establishes upon the surface of the electri- 
fied body a unique species of tension which requires a 
balancing tension somewhere. In this respect it seems 
to be not unlike a lever with long arms supporting 
weights at either extremity. The medium is certainly 
the regulative centre of activity which officiates between 
the two oppositely electrified surfaces. 

The magnet requires no second body to help in the 
maintenance of its equilibrium, because the opposed 
polarization is established within the particles them- 
selves. It is able to maintain its own tensions and possi- 
bly to keep some free energy in actual circulation. The 
magnetic circuits, being atomic or molecular, reinforce 
each other ; and as energy may be communicated from 
without, a magnet often remains permanently a magnet. 
Ordinarily it has but little occasion either to absorb or to 
give out its polarized free motion. An electric closed 
circuit, extending over a much larger domain and with a 
more complicated field of force with many co-operative 
factors, more readily loses its free energy, which, becom- 
ing converted to more ordinary conditions, escapes gener- 
ally as heat, sometimes as light, but no other free motion 
is equally permanent. 



152 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 



The accompanying diagrams may help to illustrate the 
theory and the several supposed methods. 

In Fig. 17, vibrators with the form of a Greek cross — 
possibly a system whose vibratory paths have a normal 
curvature as in Figs. 6 and 7 — are represented in the sup- 
posed magnetic condition with opposed north and south 

B 



/ , 




. /m* 



• A 



/nv 



B' 



FIG. 17. 
Atom in magnetic stress. 



poles. The three elements which compose each vibrator 
are given with accompanying arrows in this and the fol- 
lowing diagram, that the eye may readily follow the direc- 
tion of their several wave-fronts ; this may help one to 
realize that a magnet or a surface under electric stress are 
but simple modifications of ordinary states, and that the 
two, though akin in transmitting energy along closed 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. 



153 



circuits, are yet distinct in type and in co-operative 
methods. 

In Fig. 17, the complementary vibrators O A, O B, of 
the same atom, become magnetic by curving towards 
each other till brought into contact — which might occur 




FIG. 18. 
Atom in electrical stress. 



midway in the retraction of the one and the elongation 
of the other, — when the energy of both would flow at the 
same time in the same direction around the little closed 
circuit, and their reversal in the opposite direction would 
be simultaneous. Under such mutual reinforcement, 
new stresses are set up, free motion, — magnetic energy — 



154 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

perhaps flows alternately from one to the other in oppo- 
site directions, and neither vibrator can be fully elon- 
gated or retracted. The two thus associated may be 
supposed to form one half of the simplest possible 
magnet. The other pair of complementaries, O A, 1 O B 1 , 
at the same time, by the like correlation of process, are 
bent towards each other on the opposite side of the 
atomic centre in the continuous interest of atomic equi- 
poise — their wave-fronts moving everywhere in exactly 
opposite directions to those of their homologues in the 
opposed circuit. 

The opposition of closed circuits establishes the north 
and south polarization of a magnet. Different groups of 
vibrators in the same atom may be magnetized to far 
greater and lesser closed circuits of unlike dimensions — a 
probable result in a many-vibrationed atom whose vibra- 
tors represent unlike amounts of energy with differing 
elongations. The magnetic closed circuits may be, as in 
the diagram, exclusively atomic circuits, or there may be 
interatomic magnetic co-operation — another atom becom- 
ing an armature and not only helping to form a closed 
circuit but aiding greatly in the maintenance of a perma- 
nent magnetic condition, a function which seems to be 
performed by the carbon in magnetized steel, and by 
adapted impurities in magnetic ores. 

Those adjustments in the elements of a vibrator which 
would primarily induce curvature of vibratory paths 
must increase the curvature when adapted free motion 
is absorbed — mass-motion for example, — which would be 
changed to freer vibratory elongations, then, united by 
contact with the complementary, would flow on with it 
in a common direction round the tense circuit, and with 
reversal back again, in alternate rounds. Thus a portion 
of the received motion, would be expended in producing 
the magnetic field and the closed circuits, but the re- 
mainder become circulating currents so long as the 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. 1 55 

polarized circuits are maintained. On the breaking of a 
circuit its free motion would be distributed elsewhere. In 
the case of soft iron — so easily alternately magnetized and 
demagnetized — as an excellent transformer of motion 
from less effective to more effective modes, it is made to 
very efficiently reinforce electric currents. 

When an atom is under electric stress, Fig. 18, the A 
vibrators, turned from their ordinary paths, are supposed 
to elongate in one general direction, and the B vibrators 
to retract along the same paths in the same direction — all 
being simultaneously reversed. But no particle can be 
put into electric stress by itself alone. Its elongating 
waves, meeting the retracting waves of its neighbor, flow 
over into them, becoming condensed into a continuous 
line. The action and the reversal become parts of one 
and the same process, which extends itself either way 
until an electrified pathway is established or until electric 
stress is effected in a non-conductor. 

Let it be fully recognized that both electrification and 
magnetization, by hypothesis, are but special cases of 
physical co-operation — their modes of union being nearly 
as simple and as easy of comprehension as that of the 
formation of the primary molecule of the elementary 
gases — represented in Figs. 8 and 9. In all of them it is 
the compounding of complementary vibrators with wave- 
crests fronting one and the same way, and producing no 
sensible change of properties. 

The molecular complementaries, just meeting as they 
are supposed to do and working on together without 
other changes, are not found to be in any wise affected by 
their union unless it be by the simple loss of freedom to 
unite by the same vibrators elsewhere. But in forming 
their doubly polarized circuits, both in a magnet and in a 
conductor, there must be transposition of the vibratory 
paths and their longitudinal condensation. As the uniting 
lines meet side to side, this of course is the result. If they 



156 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

were brought into contact along their whole lengths, then 
with the same extent of line there would be a greatly in- 
creased dynamic power, for though the stresses are of new 
varieties they are not perceptibly increased in amounts, 
and are not in general obvious to the senses. 

But the efficient power is greatly increased. The mag- 
netic field surrounding the magnet and that surrounding an 
active current are very much more energetic than any cor- 
responding field around bodies in their normal conditions. 
A part of the activity called attractions and repulsions must 
be attributed to the polarization which aggregates instead 
of scattering its forces. To that point we will return directly. 
Now we only call attention to the great power of a high- 
tension electric current and to the wonderful reinforce- 
ment which, under proper conditions, a magnet can give 
even to such a current. There is no other energy com- 
parable to these unless it be nerve-force in the living 
organism. As our theory attributes the pliability and 
activity of all colloid substances largely to the same kind 
of side-to-side physical unions, this also is a case in point. 
Co-operating lines of motion working side to side every- 
where reinforce each other's dynamic capabilities. Hence 
the immense power of an electric current as a carrier of 
free motion. While all chemical combinations antagonize 
each other into the partial paralysis of continuous strain 
each against the other, which sends free motion else- 
where, electrification converts its opposition into a unity 
with only enough stress for establishing its highway, and, 
instead of scattering its free motion, carries it merrily 
along its own private road. 

Electrification is a physical compounding which may 
arise both simultaneously and progressively between 
many vibrators pertaining to the meeting differentiated 
surfaces, especially if the two surfaces are rubbed freely 
over each other. Arrested translation, friction in part 
transformed to molecular modes, increases the electrifica- 
tion, which can be increased up to a given limit, when dis- 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. I 57 

ruptive discharge of energy must result. Such surfaces, 
physically combined by the union of few or many outly- 
ing complementaries, may be drawn asunder ; but it is like 
pulling apart two bodies united by little intertwisted 
threads that must be forcibly separated. At the instant 
of separation the two surfaces would be according to 
theory what they always are in fact — in opposite vibratory 
phases, or oppositely electrified. 

The immeasurable amount and variety of work which 
can be done by the help of electricity, the docility and 
manageableness of this mode of force, its rapidity of 
action, and its often terrible concentration of disastrous 
power have given to electricity a reputation highly 
mysterious and occult ; but may not an entirely simple 
explanation, by throwing a perfectly comprehensible light 
upon the several modes of inducing electrification, as well 
as upon the methods of electricity transference, do much 
towards bringing all magnetic and electrical phenomena 
into the category of comprehensible modes of motion? 
Mystery explained often becomes as transparent as the day. 

If the principle of electrification in all cases is essentially 
one, conditions being widely different, electrical processes 
must differ, but not more than in other classes of motion, 
— not more even than in the translation of masses under 
unlike circumstances. 

Of surfaces which can produce electrification through 
contact, the one which is dynamically the more powerful 
must give to its ally. The uniting vibrators must be ad- 
justed each to the other ; since their vibrations synchro- 
nize, they must become practically equalized in modes and 
amounts as well as direction, but not in vibratory phases. 
These phases with their definite periods have the function 
of maintaining both atomic and interatomic equilibrium 
under all complications. 

If motion, transferred from the more to the less power- 
ful vibrators, from outgoing lines on one surface to 
ingoing lines on the other — the supposed course in the 



158 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

transference of all free energy — can be carried in this way 
through each atom and communicated to the next en route y 
then with slight curvature of vibrations a closed circuit 
returning upon itself can be formed through which elec- 
tricity may be transmitted. The energy is electricity 
because generated and moved by electrical methods, 
and that it will flow both ways along a closed circuit 
must follow if the opposed vibratory phases continue to 
be alternately active in vibrators which have become part 
of the circuit. They have become polarized in two direc- 
tions along the circuit, such polarization involving changes 
of vibratory paths with stress which prevents alike 
complete elongation and full retraction — very much as in 
chemical compounding, though effected by a very differ- 
ent method. Each vibrator, as in normal action, alternately 
moves towards and from its own atomic centre — which 
lies within the circuit. There need be no change in time, 
but there must be the overlapping of united paths in 
continuous lines. Though the motion of each vibrator 
alternates towards opposed points in the circuit, the 
currents would flow onward without reversals, flowing out 
of one system and into another without break, by exactly 
keeping time with the atomic rhythm. The energy would 
be forwarded in one direction along the outgoing A and 
ingoing B vibrators in a continuous series, and in the other 
direction by the reverse phases of outgoing B and ingoing 
A vibrators. Of course the progress of the electricity 
would be the same either way ; but it might or might 
not be a measurable quantity in more than one direction. 

In electrolytic currents, fed by chemical action neces- 
sarily equal in both vibratory phases, currents both ways 
must be equal. With ordinary conductors communicated 
energy may be transmitted either or both ways at the 
pleasure of the operator. 

Figures 19, 20, and 21 represent sections of two surfaces, 
F and G : and four vibrations of each surface — drawn here 



ELECTRIC POLARIZATION. 




FIG. 19. 

Vibrations before surface contact. 




fig. 20. 
Vibrations at moment of surface contact. 



••Qb ,, 




^o.,s 



FIG. 21. 

Same vibrations electrified and connected with the circuit. 



159 



l6o THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

as single lines but lettered like the preceding series. In 
Fig. 19 the surfaces, are separated, the vibrations on both 
are in equal stages of elongation and contraction — A 
vibrators extending, B vibrators contracting, — and the 
homologous elements of the two surfaces have parallel 
paths, but the F groups, having the greater potential, 
have correspondingly longer lines. 

In Fig. 20, all phases and directions remaining the 
same, the surfaces having been brought together, the 
elongating line O A of F comes in contact with the retract- 
ing line O B' of G. Of the eight vibrators represented, 
only these two meet in the first instant ; but they coalesce 
with an onflow of free motion into O B', and the two 
vibrators become a compound line — the wave-pulses all 
flowing in the same direction with simultaneous reversals. 
A union like this will involve more or less change in the 
vibratory paths of both, with transformations of mode 
throughout their now common pathway, which becomes 
a polarized path with its opposite poles. 

But the stress set up in this line will be carried both 
ways to correlated vibrators — the complementaries of 
each. Under constraint, communicated by repeated 
action and reaction, with simultaneous reversals in all, the 
four vibrators of surface F assume the form of a double 
line — both A vibrations energizing at the same time 
from the atomic centre and both B vibrations toward the 
atomic centre. The four vibrators on surface G have 
assumed the same form, and being compounded with 
those of surface F by a union of complementaries, the 
eight vibrators constitute but a single double line in 
electric stress, represented in Fig. 21. 

An electric circuit composed of such groups of 
physically allied lines of force, may be divided at any 
point ; one face of the divided portion must be positive 
and the other negative. One face of every particle must be 
positively, the other negatively, electrified ; but positive 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. l6l 

and negative electrifications simply differ in direction by a 
half vibration. These half-a-beat differentiated vibrators 
cannot be separated in the indivisible unit ; but any two 
particles disunited anywhere upon an electrified surface 
should manifest some degree of opposed electricity. Thus 
the theory everywhere illustrates the well-known electrical 
facts ; it postulates a conceivable how and why of this 
wonderful group of phenomena, and it indicates the 
cause and mode of transformations from the usual states 
and methods to electrical states and processes, and of the 
equally rapid transformation back to the more usual con- 
ditions of things — all with little or no disturbance of other 
closely associated phenomena. 

For example : like electricities are called mutually re- 
pulsive ; they are repulsive whenever brought together, 
face to face, because then homologous vibrations per- 
taining to the opposed surfaces must meet, end to end, 
in a common time but in opposed directions ; like particles 
of the same gas whose vibrators clash end-on, they must 
in such cases mechanically become mutually repellent. 
Simple collision is always repulsive if the two motions 
meet from opposed directions ; but if they meet because 
the more rapid overtakes the less rapid, they share the 
rate of progress and there is mutual attraction or con- 
traction. 

But two like movements having the same time and 
direction, as two electric currents made to flow side by 
side, are not repulsive ; they may draw together as one 
current, showing that the repulsion is not in the intrinsic 
character of the electricity. When like either repels or 
attracts its like, thrusts back from or draws toward 
itself, we may be certain that this depends entirely upon 
the direction of their co-operation in electrical as in all 
other phenomena. 

Unlike electricities have been said to attract each other. 
If the edge of any surface at the instant of outflow from 



l63 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

the A vibrators is made to approach another surface on 
which in a simultaneous half beat of time and direction 
there is the inflow of the B vibrators, the two phases 
directed the same way, readily flowing into one and the 
same lines, overlap or contract becoming physically com- 
pounded. If they are pulled apart now it must be with 
a real effort ; they are united by their complementaries 
in an electric stress, and they vibrate in a common time, 
but with the difference of a half beat in their respective 
phases. 

But, on the contrary, tzvo electric currents flowing in 
opposed directions — since their homologous vibrators differ 
in direction by a half beat, — if made to flow side by 
side, jolt against each other by opposed transverse motion 
and are mutually repellent. If they could become united, 
both currents would be stopped each by the other's 
opposed motion, very much as motion becomes tension 
in chemical compounds. Evidently then, neither likeness 
nor unlikeness can be inherently attractive nor repulsive. 
Meeting forces working in the same direction help each 
other; working in opposed directions, resist each other. 
There are no exceptions to these laws in electrical or in 
any other class of phenomena. When two electrified 
bodies are brought into contact from opposite directions, 
with delicacy enough to allow their free vibrators to co- 
operate, if their homologous vibrations are synchronous, 
they must be electrically repulsive ; but if their comple- 
mentary vibrators synchronize, they will be electrically 
attractive. Facts of the most various kinds abundantly 
confirm the theory. 

The two extremities of surfaces are oppositely electri- 
fied ; the two sides of thin plates are oppositely electri- 
fied : every two surfaces which generate electricity by 
contact are oppositely electrified. Of course to bring 
any two of these like electrified surfaces together, front 
to front, is to cause their vibrations to push against each 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. 1 63 

other ; but face them in the same way, they will work in 
unison. Conversely, to bring two unlike electrified sur- 
faces together, front to front, is to so place them that 
their vibrators work in the same directions in uniform 
time though in unlike vibratory phases ; but face these 
surfaces in the same direction and they will be working 
out of concord. Electrical processes being molecu- 
lar co-operations, electrical attractions and repulsions 
depend wholly upon whether there is agreement or dis- 
agreement in their respective vibratory co-operations. 
The same electrified surface may be positive to another 
surface, but negative to yet another. 

Why should electrification of this type arise only upon 
the surfaces of solids ? Evidently there only are to be 
found comparatively free vibrators, those which either are 
free or may be readily freed by friction, polarized, and 
thrown into electric stress without occasioning disturb- 
ance in the properties of the substance whose surface 
only is electrified. The always marked surface tensions 
of both fluids and solids, in their ordinary conditions, are 
evidences that in all compounds many surface vibrators 
are not utilized in chemical combination. Their unions 
are of the physical type ; their action towards light, heat, 
etc., indicates the same comparative freedom. 

Electrification, static and dynamic, means nothing 
more than the associated turning of few or many such 
measurably free vibrators, so that all of these wave-fronts 
face in one general direction, and on reversal all in the 
opposed direction. The atomic axes must lie upon the 
surface, and half the vibrators energize from and the 
other half tozvards these axes, which lie along the path 
of a closed circuit ; in this way equilibrium is maintained 
while yet the electrified elements all energize simultane- 
ously in a polarized co-operation which is successively 
reversed at each half beat. 

There must be a virtual circuit even in static electrifica- 



164 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

tion. This is the meaning of the equal but unlike elec- 
tricities found in two surfaces separated by a dielectric. 
The dielectric transmits some portion of the electricity, 
but absorbs another portion, which may be all returned 
later. The oppositely electrified surfaces are but opposed 
sides of a closed static equilibrium in which the elec- 
tricity is not freely circulated, but is held in place through 
the constraint of local tensions — the co-operative actions 
and reactions being largely local rather than co-operative 
throughout, as in a dynamic circuit. Hence there may 
exist great differences of potential in the different parts of 
astatic circuit where much energy is absorbed and retained 
instead of transmitted. A dielectric is evidently an 
absorber and transformer and a reflector of electricity, 
but it is not a good conductor. Different dielectrics 
differ amongst themselves in these several particulars 
very much as different substances vary in their modes 
of reaction against heat and light. 

Hypothetically, electrical stress always arises from the 
physical compounding of complementary vibrators hav- 
ing a difference of potential ; but the surrounding medium 
is also necessarily concerned in the resulting modifications, 
since wherever there is contact as between the vibrators 
of the medium and the surfaces, there is characteristic 
reaction. 

In the phenomena of electrolysis the unlike elements 
go forward in opposite directions — the one with, the other 
against, the assumed current. If we suppose their 
rhythms to differ in directions by a half beat, as those of 
electrification are supposed to do, the mystery of these 
opposed progressions is accounted for. Each moves to 
the rhythm with which it synchronizes. Their " electric 
charge " goes with them — that is, they carry free energy 
precisely as a ball does when it is thrown into the air ; or 
as an atmospheric particle does when it carries sound. A 
part of the process in an electrolytic circuit seems to be — as 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. 1 65 

in the transference of sound — mass translation, and another 
part increase of vibratory energy, which is transmitted to 
the electrodes where the small masses are deposited. 

The translations are polarized and oppositely directed 
like the molecular vibrations, though all paths lie within 
the closed circuit, and the amount of action in both direc- 
tions must be accurately equal. The same element, elec- 
trified by different co-workers, will move at one time to 
the positive pole and at another to the negative, and it 
may represent unlike amounts of energy in the two cases. 
But precisely equal quantities of electricity will, while 
action and reaction are equal, be simultaneously liberated 
at the electrodes. The " electric charge " is like all other 
communicated and transformed free motion which may 
be again discharged, except that, in the nature of the 
conditions, all electricity is a doubly polarized mode of 
force, while other modes either are not polarized or are 
polarized in but one direction — the direction in which the 
energy is travelling. 

The electrolytic part of a circuit is a section of a con- 
ductor, and along its path electricity is transmitted by a 
special method. When particles are thrown off from a 
carbon electrode and carried across the " striking distance " 
to the other electrode, the transmission is of a similar 
kind to that in the electrolytic field. Ordinarily elec- 
tricity is transmitted by purely molecular vibration, as 
heat and light are radiated ; though electricity travels 
both ways around the same pathway, while heat and light 
travel but one way onward. 

Electricity cannot be freely generated unless some 
mode of energy can become communicated to substances, 
which, having unlike vibratory potencies, can throw each 
other into an electric stress. Whether the communicated 
energy arises from friction, heat, or chemical action is of 
no importance ; if the electrified substances can establish 
a continuous open pathway for the transmission of elec- 



1 66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

tricity, the adapted electricity will begin to freely circu- 
late. The open pathway for electricity must return upon 
itself — that is, it must, in the nature of the case, be a path- 
way with continuity of stress bearing in opposed direc- 
tions — a pathway of closed stresses but of open 
transmission in given time and direction. 

It follows that if free motion is properly communicated 
to this unique highway it can be transmitted simul- 
taneously in both directions round the same path, at 
vibratory rates, but in a selected uniform direction. 

Electricity going one way with elongating A vibrators 
and retracting B vibrators, and other electricity the 
other way with elongating B vibrators and retracting A 
vibrators, would travel with reversed phases, possibly on 
the same line, more probably in opposed phases of dif- 
ferent lines, one going with the inflow towards atomic 
centres, as the other with the outflow from them — the so- 
called positive and negative currents. 

Inconvenient interference often arises from currents 
flowing both ways, especially fluid currents which deposit 
translated material, polarize electrodes, arrest the desired 
current, or introduce reversed action and various other 
phenomena of " self-induction." This entire class of facts 
is readily explainable by the theory. Induced electrical 
currents are always in opposition to inducing currents in 
direction, and if the explanation is accepted, the opposi- 
tion also in time by a half phase will throw much light 
upon such obscure facts as the apparent separation of 
electricities, their unlike attractions and repulsions, their 
exactly equal action in a balanced static co-partnership 
under all known conditions, though able to transport 
unequal dynamic energies, their modes of co-operation 
with magnetic modes, and many other phenomena. The 
beautiful cases of induction are almost enough in them- 
selves to justify the theory of the rhythmic transmission 
of all energies. 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. 1 67 

A small or an inefficient conductor can transmit but 
a limited amount of electricity. If over-burdened, it con- 
ducts under " high pressure " with imminent liability to 
disruptive discharge, to diversion of the energy into 
new paths with disastrous results. Given a large con- 
ducting area, the transmitted free motion readily dis- 
tributes itself and the amount of pressure corresponds ; 
the energy is transmitted at a low tension or pressure. 

A closed circuit may be maintained yet very little 
measurable energy be carried past any given point in the 
circuit ; or a large amount of energy may be moved in 
one direction and but very little in the other. There are 
many evidences that active exchanges of modes from 
motion to tension are continuous in both directions in all 
closed circuits. Electrification necessitates this. 

That the electrolytic currents unmistakably circulate 
both ways, all admit. There, in all cases, combining 
chemical equivalents are discharged at the opposite elec- 
trodes. Theory assumes that unless a practically equal 
stress is maintained in both directions throughout all 
closed circuits, the electrification must be destroyed ; 
facts seem to confirm the theory. The varying tensions 
forward the travelling energy, but they are as independent 
of it as the ether is of the light and heat sent forward by 
the aid of its adapted mechanism. 

More and less heat at the junction of two metals in a 
circuit may change the direction of the current — the cur- 
rent being the direction in which the estimated energy 
is transmitted ; if energy is transmitted both ways, a cur- 
rent flows both ways ; but where there is no measurable 
energy in transit there is still the reversal of all vibrators 
and an alternate local energizing in both directions. 

In a homogeneous conductor, environed by a homo- 
geneous dielectric, the rate of energy-transmission is 
uniform throughout — whatever the amount transmitted, 
and without reference to the kind or quality of the 



1 68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

energy, or the source from which it is derived. Whether 
the travelling force is called electricity, sound, or what 
not, it is free motion in electrical radiation. It is the 
conveyance, not the something conveyed, which decides 
the rate of progress. Break the circuit, the progression 
ceases ; change the substance of the conductor, with 
the new differentiated tensons, the rate of progress is 
modified. 

Except in the radiation of light and heat there is no 
rate of speed comparable to that of electricity. There 
is first a free path without obstructions except such as 
arise from the resistance of the transmitting elements ; 
then, by theory, these elements, shortened by the conver- 
sion of their dynamic energy into tension, are bound into 
one continuous tense chain or rather into bundles of such 
chains — each strained line as distinct from its neighbors 
as any ray of light from the common bundle of energy 
with which it is associated, and yet each line is itself in 
sections of infinitesimal advancing waves alternately re- 
versed. Suppose electricity to travel to an atomic axis 
during a half vibration and from it in the reversed half, 
or vice versa ; it will then enter the next on the line, 
repeating a like progress indefinitely. Under such con- 
ditions there can be no reason why electric speed should 
not be comparable in rate to that of light. 

The periodic reversal of the dynamic action at every 
half beat — under electric stress as under all other con- 
ditions — explains the nature of the mechanism which 
enables the practical electrician to change the direction 
of the current at will and to utilize energy travelling 
not only in either but in both directions. Without mole- 
cular reversals, the electrician's reversals presumably could 
neither be produced nor explained. Granted the mole- 
cular rhythm — which must continue even in connection 
with the most severe strains and tensions — the electric- 
ian's ready manipulations of currents become comprehen- 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM, 1 69 

sible ; they are excellent witnesses to the validity of the 
hypothesis. Under ordinary conditions the vibratory 
reversals arise on all sides of atomic axes, along paths 
pointing many ways simultaneously. There being no 
resulting uniform composition of directions, it is only in 
connection with electrical phenomena that an oppositely 
polarized transmission of energy can become utilized. 

For a similar reason in part,electric attractions and repul- 
sions — including the magnetic which are but modifications 
of the same principle — are often pronounced enough to 
move visible masses and to produce many similar phe- 
nomena while ordinarily substances whose outlying vibra- 
tors would tend to draw such light bodies as have 
adapted vibrations are checkmated by their intermediates 
with counteractive repulsions. Absorption, reflection, and 
the slow ordinary conduction of energies must depend 
upon the direction of co-operative vibrators. They are 
selective in their modes, like adhesions, chemical action, 
and all phenomena where, for the earlier theory of affin- 
ity, is substituted that of co-operative adaptations of a 
directed character. The directions of molecular co-activi- 
ties during the immeasurably small unit of time, a half 
vibration, is the key to all interpretations of phenomena 
by the rhythmic motion hypothesis. When directions 
coincide, they reinforce each other's free motion ; when 
in opposition they produce tension, with apparent at- 
traction if they unite, repulsion if they collide and separ- 
ate. Hence, as in ordinary conditions elongating and 
retracting vibrations move side by side or meet front to 
front — simple mechanical contacts determine results which 
seem so mysteriously unlike as still to foster the suppo- 
sition of occult attractions and repulsions — as formerly 
of elective likes and dislikes. 

The electric current being polarized in directions which 
lie along the path of a closed circuit, and all electric 
action having equivalent double polarity, apparent at- 



170 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

tractions and repulsions are intensified ; there is no simul- 
taneous reverse action to neutralize the effects which 
become very sensibly manifest by drawing or repulsing 
light bodies and by other most interesting phenomena. 

But with the current flowing the other way, or with 
an opposed electric charge, the behavior seems to be so 
exactly opposite, little wonder that " attractions and re- 
pulsions " should seem to depend upon inherent proper- 
ties ; little wonder that early science should adopt the 
theory of two electricities — like repelling its like but 
attracting the unlike. But test the currents, separate two 
electrodes ; not only will sparks of equal intensity make 
the striking distance ; but when two currents are equal in 
the same vicinity their attractions and repulsions become 
as confused as those of ordinary matter. 

Electrification of solids pertains only to surfaces and 
to such substances as are transparent to electricity in very 
much the same sense that other bodies are transparent to 
light, or to one or more kinds of light, or to heat. All such 
transparencies pertain to different bodies in various de- 
grees. Different conductors are more and less transpar- 
ent to electricity ; the degree of non-transparency is the 
amount of resistance which the given substance offers to 
conduction. Even a conductor must be put into an elec- 
trified condition before it will begin to conduct electricity ; 
but, on the breaking of the closed circuit, its electrifica- 
tion is not immediately destroyed, though the transmission 
of energy is destroyed. 

It follows from the last assumption that conductors are 
supposed actually to conduct. If not, how would a large 
conductor be more efficient than a small one of the same 
metal, or one of copper than one of iron ? The energetic 
side-pushes, on which Dr. Lodge makes large demands, 
may be of the nature of active inhibitions which hinder 
and in large part prevent the scattering of energy on side 
tracks by diffusion into the surrounding medium. 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. IJl 

Sound, heat, and other molecular energies may be sent 
to long distances through a closed tube ; the tube inhibits 
the scattering of the energy and helps in its own way to 
send it onward with but little loss en route ; but the 
amount of pressure at starting represents the amount of 
energy conveyed on its way by the air, not by the enclosing 
tube. 

Air or water forced by pressure bodily through a com- 
pact tube are not more dependent for rate and amount of 
translation upon the degree of pressure from behind (not 
from the tube which helps in its way by resisting reac- 
tion), than sound and heat sent through the same tube 
are dependent upon the amount of sound or heat pressure 
which impels them from the start. The air and water 
are translated en masse by simple mass-pressure, heat and 
sound chiefly by molecular or vibrator pressure, but they 
also may be accelerated on their way with the atmosphere 
along the tube. This point has been tested. Other 
things equal, pressure, amount of impulsion, decides also 
the amount, direction, and to some extent the rate of an 
electric current. Increase of dynamic action tends to 
increase of vibratory extensions or their pressure equiva- 
lent without an increase of vibratory time. 

The function of the insulating medium is similar to 
that of the tube through which energy is transmitted ; it 
rejects, it thrusts it back into the authorized channel ; its 
efforts are however but partial, the medium itself being 
thrown into unusual stresses and becoming to some 
extent an accumulator of energy ; it also transmits 
energy, yet its main action is that of an insulator, 
as indicated in several ways, chiefly by the so-called 
" magnetic " circular lines of force which surround currents 
and electrified surfaces. On our interpretation these are 
produced by the joint action of surface and medium 
vibrators. Between them they prevent much scattering 
of electricity, returning it around the curved paths which 



172 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

are set up along the main channel of conduction, little 
whorls of energy whose action is made sensible in the 
well-known polarization of iron filings, etc., when brought 
into an electric neighborhood. At any rate small closed 
circuits, local in extent, and very like those in the least 
portions of a magnet, surround all electric currents like 
an outlying halo ; and it is apparently their function to 
prevent the diffusion of energy into surrounding space. 

In a section of a circuit where the conductivity is im- 
perfect, the electricity, transformed to heat or light, is 
distributed by the usual radiative methods. Strictly 
speaking, nothing but the energy in the closed circuit is 
electricity ; when it reaches us as light it has then left its 
electric highway and is simply light, travelling and behav- 
ing like other light. Heat, sound, utilized motive power, 
all of which are denominated electricity when they repre- 
sent force which has been transmitted along conductors 
and perhaps electrically generated, are in reality trans- 
formed into the energies heat, sound, or motive power 
before they are made useful in the ordinary ways of ex- 
periment and commerce. 

The electric modes of transmitting energy are extremely 
manageable and efficient, but in reality the actual power 
which turns wheels and spindles and gives the final 
message is de-electrized at the moment in which it 
becomes the efficient worker. It dies electrically into 
the new birth of a higher utility. Prof. Hertz' beautiful 
transformed electric waves outspringing from the focus of 
a concave mirror, if no longer electric waves, as neither 
are they ordinary light, seem to represent an inter- 
mediate condition. There must be infinite varieties in 
the modes of the one (but not simple) correlative per- 
manence, motion ; for no limit can be reached to its 
possible modifications. 

All continued action seems, during its progress, to 
establish some species of unbroken working continuity. 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM, 1 73 

The translated body goes forward with no break in its 
pathway. Light, playing between yonder tree and my 
perception of it, in effect flows onward in a continuous 
line. Each fibre of the nervous system is a ready laid 
tract over which energy may travel towards or from the 
nervous centres. This more resembles a closed electric 
circuit, but the energy which travels to the nerve ganglia 
is transformed in mode when it returns to produce move- 
ments of the muscles, and afferent and efferent nerve- 
tracts have differentiated functions. 

Electricity and magnetism are so far insulated by co- 
operation with their environment that comparatively small 
amounts of the polarized energy are transformed or diffused 
into the surrounding space. During transit, other energies, 
unless guarded by artificial provisions, spread outwards as 
they advance along ever widening, fan-shaped parts of 
circles till at any given place they are found to have 
dwindled in amount inversely as the square of the distance 
from their starting-points. But electricity may be carried 
thousands of miles with but very little diminution in 
amount. 

Because very few substances will accept fully of electri- 
cal or magnetic polarization and become conductors of 
polarized energy, those which do so become notable 
and conspicuous on that account ; the others, by resisting 
electrical modes, act as more and less efficient insulators 
and accumulators. 

Each dielectric or insulator reacts against electrical 
modes in a manner and in a degree special to itself. 
Bodies which become either electric or magnetic may be 
polarized in opposed vibratory times, manifesting reversed 
and variously differentiated reactions. The co-operations 
of magnets, electric currents, and ordinary bodies offer 
many curious phenomena, which cease to be inexplicable 
if we accept the theory that ultimate units of matter are 
systems of differently related vibrators, which, under other 



174 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

like conditions, become differentiated in their modifica- 
tions, subject to the innate necessity of maintaining the 
endless complex equilibration of all vibratory phases. 

The magnetic field, composed of outlying lines of force 
— magnetic closed circuits — is often very powerful and of 
relatively great extent. That the surrounding medium is 
overborne and made to participate in closing and in main- 
taining these little orderly whirlpools of motion, as in 
establishing small circuits around an electric current, there 
can be little doubt. The concentrated magnetism — which 
is simply energy circulating in polarized infinitesimal 
circuits, — like any mode of power, in a sense swallows up 
and utilizes feebler modes with which it comes in contact. 

Both the magnetic and the outlying electric small cir- 
cuits, which surround a current being circular in character, 
the nature of various rotary effects produced by action 
between the two becomes comprehensible. Circuit-rhythms 
being either in prevailing unison or in opposition, effect 
the rotation of one or both sensible masses in accordance 
with these facts. 

The circuits are made by molecular rhythms, while the 
mass-movement is a mass-rotation ; the two work together 
on the principle by which molecular action in the muscles 
moves an arm or an entire body en masse. No primary 
rotary motion is assumed ; but atoms, molecules, and 
larger masses, each being equilibrated about its own 
centre of gravity, can readily take up rotary motion under 
any inducing cause. Bodies, which easily accept magnet- 
ism or electrification, especially the former, may probably 
have a normal curvature of vibratory paths. Increase of 
curvature from magnetization and diminution of it by 
electrification would very fairly account for various estab- 
lished facts. Metals, in general the best magnets and 
conductors, give a circular polarization to light reflected 
from their surfaces. 

The helix-circuit, spirals of currents made to surround 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. 1 75 

a magnet, and all similar phenomena connected with 
action between currents, and between currents and 
magnets, accompanied by motion which can be transformed 
to electricity, acquire a new meaning if closed circuits, 
magnetic and electrical, are studied as connected pulses — 
chains of motion — made up of alternately reversed pri- 
mary vibrators. If all physical energy is supposed to be 
vibratory through correlations, and to act along related 
paths, which may be readily displaced by modified co- 
operations, it becomes easy to recognize the more compli- 
cated modes as undergoing corresponding transformations. 

Attractions and repulsions between the poles of magnets, 
between magnets and currents and between currents and 
currents, the positions taken by para-magnetic and dia- 
magnetic bodies in relation to the earth's and other 
magnetic poles, if we remember both the curved and the 
rhythmic character of these classes of phenomena, become 
as comprehensible, as plainly mechanical in kind, almost 
as simple, and even more exquisitely beautiful than the 
more usual problems which arise from right-line motion. 

But theory postulates both characteristic likenesses and 
generic differences between magnetic and electric circuits 
and their resulting phenomena. 

Both have oppositely directed polarizations ; both have 
local circuits, evidently dependent upon and connected 
with the main circuits, and probably, in part, composed 
of and directed by those transverse portions of vibrators 
which correspond to the transverse movements which 
determine color in a ray of light. There can be no 
phenomenon in which these transverse sections of every 
vibrator do not take part, producing their own share of 
definite results. Normally they are the smaller rhythms 
within the larger rhythm, like the wavelets which run 
along a swaying cord or a stretching fibre ; in combina- 
tions, they may be the binding factors that increase sta- 
bility in the more complex rhythm and prevent ready 



176 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

dissociation ; in magnetic and electrical processes, in con- 
nection with the surrounding dielectric, insulators of 
magnetism and electricity, the mediators between electric 
and non-electric conditions. 

Transformations from ordinary to electric and magnetic 
states are alike in necessitating both peculiarly modified 
stresses and dynamic modes — with transpositions of 
vibratory paths, but without marked changes in sensible 
form or density or visible characteristics. The great dif- 
ference in the usual size of magnetic and electric closed 
circuits, though notable in itself, is not a fundamental 
distinction. 

But electric and magnetic conditions are distinctively 
unlike in their genesis, in their polarizations — the magnetic 
being largely intra-atomic, the electrical inter-atomic, — 
and in the nature of the currents which flow through their 
closed circuits, and in their attractions and repulsions. 

Electrification begins at the junction of two surfaces or 
substances between which there is an active difference of 
potential ; as electrification goes forward, the two surfaces 
or substances, if pulled asunder, are found to be more 
actively differentiated than at the moment of contact, so 
that now the one attracts whatever the other repels, and 
repels whatever the other attracts. They are oppositely 
electrified. 

Magnetization begins within a nearly homogeneous sub- 
stance having forces and properties alike in every part ; 
and balancing north and south poles are established with 
a neutral position between the two ; but if such a magnet 
is separated into two or many pieces, these pieces have 
the same magnetism that the whole magnet had, and in 
its less degree each piece behaves exactly like the original 
whole, setting up its opposite poles, its neutral point, and 
the specific magnetic behavior in every respect. Thus 
the magnet, large or small, is complete within itself, as it 
should be according to the theory. 



ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. \JJ 

The electric polarities of surfaces and conductors lie in 
opposed directions, but always within one and the same 
equilibrium of tensions, which must be virtually a closed 
circuit, even in static electrification, as there can never be 
a positive charge anywhere without an equal negative 
charge somewhere, nor an electric current without an 
actively closed path ; but the opposed polarities, lying 
always within that common circuit, are only twofold, and 
in simple balance with each other. 

Magnetic polarities are much more complex. The 
opposed directions of every local circuit are comparable 
to those of electrification, and if it be conceded that each 
magnetic closed circuit is offset by a complementary one, 
all of whose directed activities are the reverse of its own — 
the north and south poles of the magnet, as a whole, 
being the resultant of these complicated and balanced 
conditions, — the facts and the theory will certainly be 
strongly corroborative of each other. 

Whenever energy becomes electricity, static charges 
are retained by stresses proportioned to the amount as 
related to the extent of electrified surface. The alacrity 
of discharge evidences the abnormal and excessive con- 
straint, and all accompanying phenomena indicate that 
this is shared by many associated participants, fittingly 
represented by the supposed atomic vibrators. When an 
open channel is offered by a conductor, the energy travels 
in the direction of pressure and in paths of least resistance, 
but with ready reversal. 

But a magnet, however magnetized, evinces no excess 
of pressure in any direction or in any part. The only dif- 
ference of potential is such as arises in all vibrations where 
stresses are alternately transformed to free motion and 
free motion to stresses, such transformations being dis- 
tributed to every small circuit — a little whirlpool of suc- 
cessively reversed vibrations. The poles of the magnet 
are thought to have oppositely directed action, because 



178 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

this is essential to atomic, molecular, and tension or mass 
equipose. Attractions and repulsions here, as elsewhere, 
mean vibratory accord and discord. 

In no way does a magnet indicate difference of potential 
or a directed preference in giving or receiving free motion. 
It reinforces an electric current in the direction of the 
current in whichever way energy may happen to be in 
transit. The magnetic manifestations, however tumul- 
tuous in their character, are also serenely maintained in a 
perfectly balanced symmetry. 

Electrification arises from a difference of vibratory 
pressure — pressure in both vibratory directions — between 
inter-atomic complementary vibrators when brought into 
adapted contact. The greater pressure, by crowding its as- 
sociate, forces both, and the complementaries of both, into 
uniform or polarized vibratory directions ; and the same 
pressure goes onward as surplus energy transmitted along 
the polarized tract. But the polarization of a magnet, insti- 
tuted by the help of outside stimulus in many cases, and 
probably in all, begins intra-atomically between comple- 
mentaries in which there is not, and, in the nature of 
their correlations, cannot be maintained, any difference of 
pressure or potential. Associated atoms may, or may not, 
share in the vibratory process by completing and con- 
serving the closed circuit around which energy surges 
equally and alternately both ways. 

But broad, interesting, and peculiar as the electrical 
field is, and abundantly fruitful in significant diversities, 
enough has been said to indicate the general co-operative 
method by which this class of physical processes, like all 
others, may be interpreted. It brings them all into one 
unified system of vibratory co-operation. No small 
blunders, even no serious misapprehensions or mistakes, 
can invalidate the grand central principle of a true work- 
ing correlation. 



RADIATION AND GRAVITATION. 

The relation of free motion to tension, though already 
considered in some of its aspects, is a subject still very 
far from exhausted. In general, free and bound motion 
work in associated opposition, as in all simple vibratory 
action — where each is alternately transformed into the 
other in inverse ratios. But when tensions of a more per- 
manent order are established by chemical unions and the 
liberated motion is scattered elsewhere, this freed motion 
is uniformly, other things equal, repulsive or expansive in 
its character, and its action is habitually in direct opposi- 
tion to the action of the tensions, which are contractive 
or attractive. 

All free motions are radiative — that is, they tend to 
move on from tension to tension, and that onward move- 
ment is a progression, or in the nature of a push rather 
than that of a pull. It is the direction of a wave-front — 
a dash against or upon, or a progress with, whatever it 
comes in contact. Thus, in the transference of free mo- 
tion, at the reversal of the vibrator with which it is 
momentarily associated, the free motion moves upon and 
with the next vibrator, provided this next or contiguous 
tension is able to help it along its way onward. If not, 
it takes the line of least resistance or of most assistance 
in any direction, and is probably more or less transformed 
by its new associations. 

So long as it remains a free energy of any mode, it is 
always tending to expand (to elongate) the tensions with 

179 



180 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

which it is associated ; to diminish the density of the mass 
in which it happens to find itself ; in brief to push on in 
whatever direction it is bound. 

The most familiar energy of this kind is ordinary heat. 
Not only does heat tend to expand every body with 
which it is associated, but it flows freely from the warmer 
body to the colder one ; and even bodies of the same 
temperature are supposed in some way to exchange free 
modes as a normal part of their co-operative method. 
The slower conduction of heat through any mass is the 
same in principle as the radiation of heat. In conduction 
the amount of energy is usually less than in radiation, and 
it is more entangled in a complication of tensions, which 
compel it to spread slowly in all directions instead of 
moving on one way with comparatively free vibrators, as it 
does in all radiation. The difference must be less in the 
heat than in the tensions with which it happens to be asso- 
ciated. But even free motion must have form and rate. 

Electrical energy is an apparent exception to the uni- 
versal expansiveness of all free motion. But it is only an 
apparent exception. First, the free electricity is only free 
to traverse its own circuit. Otherwise it is even more 
hedged in by tensions than heat is in any ordinary mass. 
Electrification is a condition in which a peculiar, and shall 
we say a more abnormal, state of tensions is maintained 
than anywhere else. In static electrification the free mo- 
tion is dissipated ; and when the free current is sent 
through a conductor, the conductor itself is first put into 
what seems to be an extra-tense condition ; and also, by 
the joint action of its surface vibrators and the surround- 
ing dielectric, it is insulated along its whole course. Thus 
the electricity can only traverse the circuit ; and one 
phase of the free energy can only travel one way, while 
the other phase must travel the other way. To that ex- 
tent, and to that extent only, is electrical energy free to 
move on. To that extent it pushes forward with incredi- 



RADIA TION AND GRA VITA TJON. 1 8 1 

ble readiness, but it can only move along its circuit unless 
it can regain a wider freedom. 

Secondly, the energy is always attempting to obtain a 
greater freedom. Tensions are broken up by disruptive 
discharge. The free electricity to a large extent becomes 
heat, and, so far as the current is concerned, is dissipated 
and wasted. In reality the form and rate of the energy 
is changed — lowered in tone, — and, true to its impulse to 
push onward, it moves off along the first tension to which 
it is fairly adapted. 

What then is free motion or working energy ? Simply 
that class of modes which can freely move on from ten- 
sion to tension, or with moving tensions, wherever the 
opportunity presents ; it is motion freed from reversal of 
direction necessitated by any tension with which it is as- 
sociated in such exact equivalence that it is itself alter- 
nately converted into tension and reconverted into motion 
at every half vibration. When from any cause whatever, 
as any outside interference, tensions are formed without its 
transformation into tension, and it is free to move else- 
where, it may then remain free until it is again brought 
into conditions which reconvert it into tension or alter- 
nately into tension and equivalent free motion. Any two 
or more lines of vibration, with their transverse wavelets, 
brought into contact side to side throughout their entire 
length, or for any portion of that length, must either 
coincide and work together in both directions, or inter- 
penetrate and fall against each other in opposed directions 
— thus between them producing a new tension. The effect 
is a shortening and thickening of both lines. If they 
belong to different systems, the axes of these systems are 
drawn together, and there is mass condensation with in- 
creased density ; but a commensurate amount of freed 
energy makes its escape elsewhere ; and such dynamic 
overflow is the staple of all free motion, which can be 
radiated and made to do work elsewhere. 



1 82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Of course a residue of free motion remains with the 
tensions and with the freer vibrators. As allies and totals, 
motion and tension, or, as science phrases it, energy and 
matter, are both constants and indestructibles. 

Now what is gravitation ? 

That some kind of prolonged co-operation, which varies 
in its amount inversely to the square of the distance is con- 
tinuously maintained, directly or indirectly, between all 
masses large and small, is universally admitted. To 
express this co-operation in terms of the rhythmic theory, 
either every atom must have special prolonged vibrators 
that directly reach and combine with correlated vibrators 
in every other atom — between which there is the usual 
continuous transformation of modes, varying with the 
distances, but on the whole tending to draw the axes 
together, — or else the gravitative tendency is the resultant 
of co-operations between ordinary vibrators brought into 
contact and reaction in the usual ways. 

The latter supposition is a good working hypothesis. 

All rhythmic systems which at any time are vibrating 
within a given area, whether they belong to condensed 
matter or to the ether, must presumably be working — not 
each system in unco-operative isolation, but, to some 
extent, every system in co-operation with its multitudes 
of surrounding kindred. This means that every system 
is in some way continuously modified by its environment ; 
that it vibrates, not with what would be its normal cycle 
of changes if it were the sole occupant of the space, but 
that its elongations are either increased by a surplus of 
communicated motion or decreased by the subtraction of 
free motion. 

This latter state would result, provided other systems 
in its vicinity were still more deficient in free motion than 
itself. There would be no need for a permanent union 
between them, but simply for enough contact to enable 
them to exchange equivalent modes of energy, the one 



RADIATION AND GRAVITATION. 1 83 

giving free motion for tension, the other some of its 
tension as an equal barter which nature everywhere 
exacts. 

Now we know that this is exactly what all bodies of 
unequal temperatures do whenever they are brought into 
the same vicinity. The free motion, heat, is interchanged 
until the overheated body becomes of the same tempera- 
ture with its surroundings, but without change of proper- 
ties or other chemical manifestations. On one side, there 
has been actual loss of free motion, with a gain in tense- 
ness or rigidity — shortened elongations ; on the other, a 
gain in free motion, which implies extended elongations. 
Wherever tensions are in excess, as in all solids and in a 
less degree in liquids, the surrounding atmosphere con- 
tinually tends to give up comparatively free motion to 
these denser bodies, even when they all have a common 
temperature ; hence the atmosphere, affected by this 
relation as well as by pressure in the immediate neighbor- 
hood of denser states of matter, is itself more dense than 
the upper layers of the air ; thus the atmosphere becomes 
more and more rare the farther it is removed from the 
earth, until a degree of tenuity has been reached at which 
physicists cease to estimate it as a part of the earth and 
pertaining to terrestrial gravity. 

In current phraseology, at that distance the earth's 
atmosphere ceases ; but it has come to an end only in a 
sense analogous to that in which a solid or a liquid are 
supposed to terminate at their respective visible surfaces. 
Science teaches us that in some way every surface is con- 
tinually in co-operation with the medium by which it is 
surrounded ; that this environment interpenetrates the 
densest bodies with continuous interchange of modes 
between the contiguous masses. The ether is generally 
supposed to effect such interchanges between ordinary 
substances through some special intermediate action ; but, 
admitting that all bodies are composed of harmonic vibra- 



1 84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

tions, these can communicate directly whenever brought 
into contact. They can take the functions and do the 
work of hypothetic environments. The ether is only 
required, then, to have properties like in kind to other 
physical substances. 

With any two co-operative bodies, the one having the 
most free motion will exchange some portion of its 
dynamic force for a denser mode ; the other may absorb 
the energy, or, if directly transmitting it, it will undergo 
only brief local modifications. But dynamic force is not 
always free motion. 

Probably even at a common temperature the denser 
body tends to absorb active modes from the less dense at 
every contact of vibrators, as a solid to absorb from the 
atmosphere, and that to gain in tension. If in turn this 
atmosphere did not receive free motion from the layer of 
air next it, and that from the next indefinitely — another 
aspect under which we may study the possible nature of 
pressure, — the change of state from a gas to a liquid or a 
solid would apparently be imminent. But the interchange 
of modes is progressive in all directions. Being exclu- 
sively co-operation between vibrators, the interchange 
cannot be recognized directly by the senses, yet absorp- 
tion seems to be one process in which gravitation is 
steadily manifest ; it leads also to the growth of the 
denser body through combination with the less dense, 
and is the reverse of evaporation and expansion from 
heat. Yet the effects of this appropriating tendency of 
condensations is complicated by conditions which promote 
and control changes of state, and tend to maintain the 
existing state whatever that may be at the time. 

The thermometer can measure no mode except that of 
heat ; in all other exchanges it is as helpless as vision is 
in recognizing the flow of heat ; but that molecular inter- 
change of modes is continuous between all contiguous 
bodies is not doubted, nor is it always the simpler har- 



RADIATION AND GRAVITATION. 1 8$ 

monic convertibility between tension and dynamic action. 
There are rusts and other combinations. 

The hypothetic construction of atoms requires that in 
inter-atomic exchanges the dynamic impulse must invariably 
flow from the giving atomic centre and towards the receiving 
atomic centre ; it may flow onward to the system next in 
line, as when any form of energy is transmitted, or it may 
be absorbed and serve to increase the elongations of 
the receiving system. Tension, from the nature of it, is 
inherently contractive. Compared with dynamic motion, 
the action is reversed, the pull being centre wards. Dynamic 
modes, flowing into a system, co-work with its dynamic 
modes which are on the increase during vibratory retrac- 
tion ; hence at any atomic centre, motion, if in excess, 
may flow along several outgoing vibrators and by them 
be handed on to vibrators overtaken at their moment of 
reversal along the same lines extended. Hence the travel- 
ling motion goes forward without interruption. On this 
general plan, as already indicated, all energy is transferred 
wherever it can find an efficient transmitting medium. 

Tension and density represent different closely related 
aspects of the same phenomenon. If in any body or 
neighborhood dynamic action is below the average of its 
surroundings, vibrators remaining unduly contracted — 
tense as applied to the pull and dense as applied to 
weight — and thus rate of progress slow in proportion, 
motion received by them is not usually radiated but 
absorbed. The vibrators begin to push outwards farther 
and to move more quickly and vigorously ; and, in appear- 
ance, the whole substance becomes expanded generally in 
all directions. This is the known effect of heat. If heat 
continues to be communicated, after a time radiation 
will begin. 

Radiation moves from the source and centres of radia- 
tion with dynamic force which is directly as the energy 
and inversely as the square of the distance from the point 



1 86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

of radiation ! Heat and light, receding from the centre 
of radiation, at any given point exert dynamic power 
according to this law ; they get more and more dis- 
tributed the farther they move into a larger circumference. 

Simple ether systems, vibrating together in inter-atomic 
equipoise*, in harmony with all known data may be sup- 
posed to transmit every free energy by communicating it 
from elongating vibrators of one system to retracting 
vibrators of the next system in the line of the radiation — 
the one giving and the other receiving at the instant of 
normal contact, which would be at the instant of mutual 
reversal. Thus the energy would flow on, never back- 
wards, but in continuous general directions, and the ether 
particles would be but little and briefly modified by the 
transit. 

But matter, condensed by chemical compounding, with 
stress in opposed directions, can never readily forward 
any type of free motion except under specially adapted 
conditions. Its steady mechanical effort must be to 
throw off its bonds ; but tensions, being in excess, act in 
part as merely dead weight ; and every direct pull of the 
opposed vibrators must tend to draw their centres of 
gravity yet closer together. The general resultant of 
this handicapped energizing is gravitation. The atomic 
structure hypothetically includes a constant given quantity 
of motion which in its original state — that is, in an isolated 
and only internally co-operative state — is an endless 
transformation of free motion into tension and tension 
back into free motion alternately in every semi-detached 
vibrator. But as the increasing free motion in one set, 
let us say in all of the A vibrations, exactly balances the 
increasing tension in all of the B vibrations, and vice versa, 
the whole amounts of tension and of free motion in every 
atom must always remain in precise equilibrium. Also 
the sum of all tensions and the sum of all free motions 
must always remain equal and in equilibrium. Thus the 



RADIATION AND GRAVITATION. 1 87 

total of tension and the total of free motion are both 
constants which are continuously undergoing a correlated 
transformation : free motion becoming tension ; but simul- 
taneously, and because of the one change in mode, arises 
the necessity that an equivalent amount of tension shall 
become free motion — the other phase of the correlated 
change. 

It follows that the repulsion of free energizing is the 
mathematical equivalent of the attraction of the tensions ; 
in other words, that radiation and gravitation, as totals, 
must always continue to be equal and opposed modes of 
force, and that the literal extensiveness of the relative 
world will continue to be perpetually maintained. 

In a virtual sense the free motion is vibratory elonga- 
tion, and gravitation is its commensurate retraction. The 
two are not directly conjoined, as in the primary vibrators ; 
yet in a broader view they are but the two halves of the 
great tidal wave of motion. They are, in the constitution 
of things, each indirectly as dependent upon the opposed 
but correlated opposite mode of activity as the free 
motion and the tension in each atom arise in direct 
correlation. It is not more certain in the one case than 
in the other that when free motion becomes tension a 
corresponding amount of tension must become free 
motion. There is still the endless rhythm, more remote 
now in its manifestations, but still the keynote to all the 
harmony and variety of the universe. 

But we must take up the whole subject more in detail. 

Heavy bodies are even sensibly attractive. The denser 
the mass, the more emphatic the pull ; and the double- 
centred influence is propagated outwards with ever 
diminishing strength — its pathways and its effects being 
precisely those of a reversed radiation. 

Every vibrator, hampered by loss of free movement, 
checked also in the absorption of dynamic energy by 
complications of tension involved in changes from a free 



1 88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

gas to a fettered solid, its own free modes probably 
radiated to a distance, and its neighborhood one where 
free motion is below the average, the manifest effect 
must be that of a recurrent drawing centrewards com- 
mensurate with its amount of density. 

Progressively from stage to stage of every condensation, 
all mathematical adjustments have been dependent upon 
the amounts of lost motion and equivalent gain in stress. 
Hence the necessity for an equally orderly return towards 
freedom may often aid in preventing the acceptance of 
non-adapted free motion with which any body may be 
brought into contact ; as when light, heat, sound, or any 
other energy is reflected or transmitted rather than ab- 
sorbed by even very dense substances. 

Gravitative pull determines the weight of a substance ; 
but a given amount of pull may be distributed over a 
greater or less apparent space as the body is more or 
less dense ; and its weight is not absolute, since it must 
depend on the distribution of the correlative pull of the 
substance with which at any time it may co-operate. 
Other things equal, weight is as the mass but inversely 
as the square of the distance from the mass-centre ! The 
balance, the lever, and all other mechanical contrivances 
recognize this principle and must adjust their processes 
in exact accordance with it. But the law is the outgrowth 
of the primary rhythmic vibrations and of their progressive 
co-operations. Mass is a constant, but whether its energy 
at a given time will be static or dynamic will depend 
upon the form of the space — upon the amount of density 
— which its co-operation with other masses has forced 
upon it at a given time. Gravitation belongs to the 
static order of energies ; hence it must be estimated as 
a steady pull everywhere varying inversely with the 
distance. 

By construction, each partially tense atom and each 
vibration of that atom at every phase of the vibratory 



RADIATION AND GRAVITATION. 1 89 

periods has an established ratio between its tensions and 
its free motions. But these being from time to time dis- 
turbed by other inter-atomic interferences, increased 
tensions are formed and commensurate free motion is 
sent elsewhere. The total of free motion remains un- 
changed ; so does the total of motion-interference, of 
tensions. Wherever excess of free motion is received and 
retained, there tensions relax and the elongations extend 
beyond the normal bounds — the total, motion and tension, 
remaining unchanged. 

But free motion separated from its place and its function 
in the ultimate vibration is no longer a stable factor any- 
where. Ready to move on at every chance, to flit here 
and there in every dynamic mode, it becomes the 
mercurial spirit in all sensible changes. Every system 
which receives free motion of any mode receives a ten- 
dency to disturbed equilibrium, which it can rectify only 
by transformations in its own modes ; hence the intricate, 
never-ending series of changes — all purely motions, all 
transformed simple vibrations — become the complicated 
processes of complex active equilibration. Nowhere can 
free motion go forward alone. Always relative, it must 
find some correlative with which at every place it both 
acts and reacts, doing its own share, but no more than its 
own share, in every process. 

The deserted tensions are more apparently stable, be- 
cause — arising from some interference of vibrations 
oppositely directed in both phases, or from disturbance 
among the more intimate correlations within the atomic 
system resulting in consequence of the inter-atomic inter- 
ferences — the action becomes largely that of a prolonged 
but successively reversed strain — an incredibly rapid 
double pull and the alternating double push which together 
keep the tension as a whole in sensibly the same place. 
Unless a tension is sent forward by outside free motion 
— translated — or drawn from its place by gravitation, in 



190 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

which case, though the translation is equal, the smaller 
mass only is apparently moved, no tension can change its 
centre of gravity or in any way move on in place. 

Centrally fixed where it is, so far as internal energy is 
concerned, there is the continuous mechanical tendency 
in every tense vibration to restore itself to its normal 
modes, which can be done only by the absorption of free 
motion. That tendency, always a ratio of the existing 
quantity of the tenseness or density, and always operative, 
is gravity. 

The relation between gravitative pull and its separated 
free motion is not obvious to the senses, the one seeming 
to be never changing, the other to be ever changing ; but 
their changes alike are purely modal and parallel, though 
exactly opposed in their effects — local gravitation vary- 
ing in amount and place with varying tensions as demon- 
strably as free motion does. In the total, static and 
dynamic modes, or tension, and free motion must be ab- 
solutely fixed quantities and equal energies ; and gravita- 
tion the effect and expression of tension, as expansion is 
of free motion. Together they produce all forms of 
activity. If every atom were dissociated from every 
other, the centreward strain of atomic gravity would 
accurately equal the inter-atomic gravity which has helped 
to build the present universe and that which will con- 
tinue to act under all future conditions. 

Heat, generally of a low grade, is more or less evolved 
in every known process, because in every process there is 
simple local condensation. This heat moves more and 
less readily among all ordinary tensions to wherever 
dynamic action is most lacking, and is an energetic pro- 
moter of local equilibrium, which, in the nature of the 
case, is endangered by all transformations of modes. 
Thus the evolved heat is either soon re-absorbed — its more 
general fate — or it is radiated to where it is needed ; and, 
on this theory, is not destined to the limbo of a general 



RADIATION AND GRAVITATION. 191 

" waste heap " of inutility. It is the convenient small 
change always passing from one tension to another ; it is 
pre-eminently dynamic or free. 

A current of electricity is a stream of less free motion 
undergoing transference ; it differs from heat in being 
transmitted by a special process — travelling from tension 
to tension along highways established for its particular 
benefit. But heat differs more widely in its varieties of 
locomotion. Here it is needful only to call attention to 
the claim that, although free motion is most various in its 
manifestations, we know it only when it is either being 
redistributed or is helping in the continuous adjustment 
of familiar processes. Regarding it as the active surplus 
energy sent forward at need to restore the balance 
disturbed by all tension-forming, we can begin to com- 
prehend why and how the same mass may at the same 
time radiate heat — an expansive mode of energy — and 
also " attract " other bodies with a given contractive force. 

Radiation pertains only to the elongating phases of all 
co-operating systems ; gravitation, only to their retracting 
phases. Radiation, which includes the redistribution of 
all free motion, begins whenever and wherever in a com- 
plexity of changes dynamic energy comes to be in local 
excess ; gravitation, which includes all attractions or 
lineal contractions, increases locally in a fixed ratio with 
the mass density. The two great generators and distrib- 
uters of a released motion are intra-atomic and chemical 
combinations of vibrators, the two great accumulators of 
gravitative power are also intra-atomic and chemical com- 
binations of vibrators. Evolved motion, as we know, is 
set free and diffused in accordance with the law of inverse 
squares, and gravitative force, inhering in the tensions, 
practically varies in action as they vary in density in ac- 
cordance with the law of inverse squares. 

Hence it becomes evident that sensible motion and 
measurable gravity generally are neither directly opposed 



IQ2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

nor directly associated in their differentiated modes! 
The action of gravity is most evident in connection with 
dense, comparatively permanent bodies ; that of free 
motion, the so-called " energies " of different kinds, is 
usually associated with diffused bodies which have a defi- 
ciency of tensions. Gravity is staid and stable, the dyna- 
mic modes endlessly mercurial ; the one remains, the other 
migrates ; the one the household resident, the other the 
transient visitor — disturber of the domestic order and 
often a dissociator of the peacefully united family. The 
one conserves and draws the separated together, the 
other divides and drives asunder. Free modes are the 
mighty travellers, flying even from world to world ; 
but static modes are the efficient movers of the worlds 
themselves. 

But gravitation and free motion are never really sepa- 
rate. No process is carried on without the co-operation of 
both, though they may closely co-work in an endless 
balanced interchange, as in the primary atoms ; or either 
become temporarily in excess in any given substance, 
which then exerts either an excess of attractive or of re- 
pulsive power as the case may be. But excess of one 
type anywhere is exactly offset by excess of the other 
type somewhere. 

Transformations are always going forward in both 
directions. Gases liquefy, liquids become gases. Minerals 
solidify the gases with which they combine, but they also 
absorb free motion, disintegrate, and dissociate, becoming 
themselves gaseous. 

Vegetation renews itself by the help of sunlight and 
heat, growing by appropriating from its surrounding earth 
and atmosphere, but it replenishes them both again from 
decaying vegetation. Gravitative pull and dynamic push 
work in all these processes, now one and now the other in 
the ascendant. Animals give and take, and their organic 
functions all illustrate the same complex rhythm — sub- 



RADIATION AND GRAVITATION. 1 93 

stances now appropriated and transformed, now rejected. 
Winds and currents, capriciously changeable to the un- 
initiated, are found to circulate in an accurate mathema- 
tical waltz ; it becomes increasingly possible to compute 
and predict atmospheric changes, and multitudes of the 
most various events can be foreshadowed with much 
precision. All physical changes group themselves more 
and more in the verifiable category. If contrast and 
oppositeness are found to be co-operative at every stage 
of every process, this is only another way of expressing 
the universal law of equal action and reaction, which law 
calls into perpetual exercise both motion and stress — in 
other words, both gravitation and repulsion between the 
co-operating factors. 

The opposed types of energy are equally fundamental, 
equally and ever presently active as totals, but with end- 
lessly varying ratios in unlike local co-operations. It is 
this co-operative variability which produces the infinite 
diversity of phenomena. 

The earth is largely in a state comparable to that of a 
room containing solids, semi-fluids, and fluids all at a com- 
mon temperature. In such a room there is no measura- 
ble transfer of energy, because, though there are differ- 
enced states of matter, the free motion adapted to these 
states is equivalent in all ; as in gaseous particles, under 
like conditions, the free motion and its power of doing 
work is equal in the light and the heavy molecules. In our 
room of equal temperature there is probably interchange 
of free modes between the contiguous vibrators, but as it 
is only the give and take of equivalent free activities able 
to readily adapt themselves to their new tensions, with 
no other transmutation either in themselves or in the 
tensions, everything remains to the senses as it was before 
the exchange. Nothing can change its physical condi- 
tion any more than it can change its place, except with 
efficient outside help. 



194 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

But suppose a large amount of intense heat to be com- 
municated to the contents of the apartment. Many 
things begin to change visibly in some characteristic way. 
Water will become water vapor. Certain jelly-like bodies 
begin to evaporate their more fluid parts while the 
residue hardens to a solid. One metal melts at one 
temperature, another at another. Every different body 
absorbs a different quantity of the heat, and behaves 
after its own particular fashion. 

The heat of the sun poured so freely upon the earth is 
taken up even more differently by the greater variety of 
bodies which, receiving it, each reacts for itself according 
to its nature and conditions at any given time. Then 
day and night alternate in each latitude. In one part of 
the day there is a flood of warmth and light poured down 
upon everything ; in the next these same bodies begin to 
pour back into space a part of the same heat received 
but a few hours before. The received energy is still held 
so lightly that it begins to radiate into the colder atmos- 
phere at the moment of demand by the lowered tempera- 
ture of the air. In this way there is a perpetual round of 
interchange variable in kind and amount but always a 
free giving and taking in rigid mathematical exactitude 
and with an absolute equity of exchange on both sides. 

The sun keeps the earth on every part of its surface in 
one perpetual round of small moving and living changes. 
All life would fade and die if this needed dynamic power 
were withdrawn. It comes to us just when and where it is 
needed ; to a world where the tensions predominate, and 
from which the free energies have already been largely 
driven away. 

This beautiful energy of light and warmth is precisely 
adapted to the needs of every living thing upon the 
earth — at any rate it is so far suited to their development 
that either directly or indirectly all organic growth is de- 
pendent upon it. It is nature's great method of return- 



RADIATION AND GRAVITATION. 1 95 

ing the needed lost energy to the dense surface of a 
nearly cold world. But it is supposed that, though the 
same life-quickening energy is given to the moon, there 
there is no living response, no growth, no fruiting, or 
blossoming into either usefulness or beauty. Thus every- 
where the reaction is shown to be the half of the process, 
and in the case of all tensions it is the final, stay-at-home 
half which alone can consummate desirable results. 
Adaptation in the modes of energy received are far more 
important than the amounts communicated. 

The perturbed sun is evolving and distributing im- 
mense quantities of heat ; the ether is the efficient 
mechanism for its transference ; earth and other planets, 
and doubtless remoter regions, each receives the welcome 
and needed free motion in its own fashion and presumably 
to its own advantage. It is the most familiar and the 
most generally useful circulating medium of nature's great 
commercial exchange. 

It is not known in what way the sun is reimbursed, 
but that it reaps its own benefits who can doubt? 
Whether it is steadily losing dynamic modes and becom- 
ing condensed, or whether by some round of changes it 
gives only to receive again the same free-motion types is 
not certainly determined, and on this subject we have no 
present motive for lingering. Certain it is that while 
most of the planets have excess of tensions over the 
normal, at least upon their surfaces, the sun has an 
excess of free motion and deficiency of tensions upon 
its surface. 

The free-motion excess the sun is doing its best to 
redistribute. But tensions can only be redistributed by 
dissolution or by their bodily translation. The motion of 
the planets upon their axes and their revolutions about 
the sun must be interpreted as one class of effort towards 
a direct reciprocity which is so complicated by other con- 
ditions that it becomes only an indirect reciprocity. The 



I96 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

spinning planets instead of falling bodily into the sun 
only go on wheeling about in such places and at such 
rates as enable them to help in maintaining the equi- 
librium of the solar system as a whole. 

No real loss arises from the formation of tensions ; and 
if these tensions are of a class which can still effectively 
utilize free motion of any kind for the common advantage, 
as most organized tensions can and do in the world which 
stands in the highest relations to life and mind, incalcula- 
ble advantages arise from the aggregative phases of co- 
operation. But inorganic tensions are of a type which 
involves the sleep of most efficient action except that of 
unremitted gravitation. So far as the outside world is 
concerned that is almost their one remaining talent, and 
accordingly it is kept in steady and beneficent co-opera- 
tion, which is entirely effective in its results. 

The law of gravitation affirms the co-operative charac- 
ter and also the tension of the double-sided pull between 
any two gravitating masses. We need only to indicate 
the rhythmical method of vibratory co-partnership in 
gravitative action. Although tensions are compounded 
vibrations, yet every vibrator still performs its own amount 
of work. But its working power is inverse to the dis- 
tance from the atomic centre, in elongation ; but in retrac- 
tion the pull centreward increases in the same ratio. 
Hence when its customary path is shortened by tense- 
ness there is a proportionately greater pull within the 
same lineal space — that is, along the axis of the vibration. 

The shorter the vibratory line, the stronger the retrac- 
tive pull. The denser the mass, the greater its centre- 
ward drawing, or, as generally expressed, the greater its 
weight, or the larger its gravitative force. But the associ- 
ated action of all the elements of the mass is like all other 
associated action, to be estimated as a resultant, so that 
the centre of the mass is the practical gravitative focus. 
Such vast dense masses as the earth and the sun are both 



RADIA TION AND GRA VITA TION. 1 97 

pulling each other by myriads of tightening lines which in 
effect are as continuous as we have seen the reverse lines 
of radiation to be, when regarded as a perpetual drawing 
together, while yet they are so absolutely discontinuous 
to any crossing translated mass with its slower motions 
that its progress is not sensibly impeded. 

Every vibration mechanically tends to regain its normal 
state lost through outside restraint, as a disturbed balance 
restores itself by any available means. The absorption of 
enough free energy to enable it to overcome the restraint 
is the only available means of every tension, but it must be 
energy adapted to both lines of the tension to be most 
effective. 

Gravitation is the unremitted drawing along the lines of 
force in all directions from the centre of gravity. The 
co-operative resultant at any point is determined by the 
distance from the gravitative centre of the mass ; the local 
pull, by the density of the mass. The pull at every point 
of every vibrator is decided by its present state as differ- 
enced from its normal state ; but pull and counter-pull 
within the mass is not a measured quantity. 

Absolute weight does not vary with density, but gravi- 
tative pull estimated as weight varies with position as 
related to other masses, and on the earth it is practically 
measured by density. Pressure and gravitation pull are 
reversed sides of the same phenomenon. 

On the same principle by which the motion of a falling 
body is accelerated as it approaches the earth, the atomic 
pull is accelerated as it approaches the atomic centre. 
Whether its vibrations are tense and short, or long and 
rapid, the time is the same, the centreward pull is the 
same, the outpush is the same. Its combinations have no 
effect upon these atomic constants. 

Thus is the often verified law of gravitative action in 
true accord with the constitution of our hypothetic rhyth- 
mic atom. Every atom in effect is drawing upon every 



198 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

other, whether in isolation or in combination, with a force 
directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the dis- 
tance. The effect is sensibly recognized only in the action 
of large and dense masses. 

A mode of action travels in free motion, a form of ener- 
gizing which adapts itself to the tensions to which it 
migrates. The push of the deserted tension is no less 
than it was before, only it is now antagonized by a coun- 
ter-push. Its work is hidden and its power latent in the 
same sense that heat is latent when it is engaged in doing 
purely internal work. The free motion and its transmitting 
tensions are working together in the same direction, but 
in gravitation the co-operating tensions are pulling against 
each other in opposed directions. There is the same par- 
allel between the two general methods that there is in 
molecular physical and chemical compounding. When 
the co-operation is in one direction the result is increase, 
advance ; when in opposed directions it is an advance, 
but face to face or towards each other, with condensation 
along the axis of co-operation. The two processes are 
true equivalents but precisely opposites in method. In 
each vibrator they are in direct opposition ; in gravitation 
and radiation in indirect opposition. 

In the nature of the case the pull between tensions and 
other tensions must always tend towards the bodily trans- 
lation of both masses. If there were no counteracting im- 
pulsion, they would draw toward each other as two chemi- 
cally compounded atoms approach into compacter quar- 
ters, but they also are repelled by their vibratory reversals 
and perhaps made to dance to and fro with every reversed 
beat of their vibratory elements. 

By the parallel and universal co-operative plan, the 
wandering free motions and the stay-at-home tensions, 
still being true equivalents, set the worlds to rotating and 
revolving, and regulate the translations of all smaller 
bodies between them, in the interest of a universal action 
and reaction, and of an all inclusive continuous equilibrium. 



RADIATION AND GRAVITATION. 1 99 

An equilibrium of motion — total motion being the 
co-operation of individual motion systems — is even more 
imperative than was the old equilibrium between bodies 
at rest. Since nothing in our universe is inert, and since 
inertia itself is but resistance to the breaking up of some 
established and well-balanced co-operation, if a general 
harmony and equipoise is to be maintained between all 
local motion systems and between every part of the vast 
total, the foundations of such equilibration should be laid 
in the inmost constitution of the ultimate units of mo- 
tion. They alone could maintain such perpetual adjust- 
ments and readjustments under all possible conditions as 
must uniformly secure a perfect moving rhythm of har- 
moniously balanced changes, such as we find to be in 
actual or perpetual operation. 

Doubtless this wonderful necessity for active, continu- 
ous, universal equilibration entails many small hardships. 
It must regulate alike the tumbles of the smallest child 
and the voyages of the sun himself with all his family of 
planets through unmeasurable spaces. It must engender 
tornadoes and earthquakes and avalanches ; must control 
alike the winds and the waves and the pulsations of every 
beating heart. All the same, who would not accept the 
casualties as inseparable parts of a system so beneficent — 
as indeed the only possible beneficence unless the whole 
of relative being is to be unmade and remade afresh ? But 
who would attempt to suggest a scheme more magnificent, 
more benevolent, or tending more effectively to the 
universal good ? 

Note. — The term equilibration, which has been appropriated to signify a 
hypothetic dead world in which every thing, having been reduced to a com- 
mon temperature of a low grade, can undergo no further transformations, 
and must remain a world of balanced inertia, can equally well be used to 
signify a perfect dynamic balance, an endless moving rhythm of mutual 
readjustments. No other term can so well express that conception. 





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SUMMING UP. 

Until physics can gain some consistent theory of the 
nature of mass or matter and of its precise relation to active 
force, it cannot give a quite satisfactory and consistent 
explanation of natural phenomena. The best authorities 
in science recognize that substance is force rather than an 
inert something which has force — though the modes of its 
activity are often static rather than dynamic. Adding 
a structureless mediating ether to a but half compre- 
hended heavier matter is only piling Pelion upon Ossa. 
Hence all recent theorizers find, with Professor Fitzgerald, 
that " the hard atom is an abomination," and that it is 
desirable that in some way all matter be reduced to 
motion, and all potential energy to kinetic energy — that 
is, to active energy in one or other of its two types, which 
we prefer to designate tensions and free motions. 

Motion, because it is action extensive in kind, is the 
content which fills — occupies — what would otherwise be 
blank nothingness — an extension, formless, without con- 
tents, without bounds, an absolute void. Motion is the 
limited tenant of this unlimited realm. Motion is configu- 
ration. The space which it fills at any moment is the real 
form at that moment. 

Prof. J. P. Cooke says : " The ultimate elements of each 
immutable atom are a definite mass and a definite mode 
of motion . . . mass and energy are the only fun- 
damental elements of Nature." J 

1 New Chemistry, p. 393. 
200 



SUMMING UP. 20 1 

But the motion is the mass as it is the energy. It must 
be compacted into a more or less permanent texture which 
can be recognized by the senses before it becomes cur- 
rently accepted as the only physical substance, as the only 
element of material forms ; but its ever pliant extensive- 
ness is fully adequate, by various interweaving, to evolve 
all figures, visible and invisible, and to produce all modi- 
fications of physical substance and property. A fibre of 
wool is neither broadcloth, nor flannel, nor yarn, nor the 
stocking knitted from the yarn ; yet all of these are made 
out of intertwisted and intermingled fibres of wool ; and 
the uncombined fibre is the only staple from which pure 
woollen goods can be manufactured. 

In a strictly parallel sense motion is mass, and the only 
staple out of which all more complex and compact bodies 
are evolved. What need for any other ? Every motion 
occupies a space having length, breadth, and thickness ; 
hence it has a definite though perpetually changing shape. 
Being crowded by other pliant forms into intimate but 
most various alliances, and, like a weaver's shuttle, as it 
and they are perpetually darting to and fro, the inter- 
woven product is tangible matter. 

Prof. Wurtz says : " Atoms are not material points ; 
they possess a sensible dimension and doubtless a fixed 
form . . . they act in some manner as points of ap- 
plication." He affirms that force "must emanate from 
something or must be applied to something which exists 
apart from it." 1 

This last clause is virtually affirming the correlativity 
of motion. Points of application must exist on both sides, 
not only in the something to which force is applied, but 
also in the something to which a reciprocating reaction is 
applied. The fixed form of the atom seems like going back 
to the old " hard atom " — possibly to an elastic solid. But 
the poverty of language is often misleading. Prof. Cooke's 

1 The Atomic Theory, p. 308. 



202 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

phrase, " a definite mode of motion," may mean one and 
only one mode of motion, or a method which might in- 
clude a successive rhythm of changes and the fixed form 
may signify a definite modification of forms. 

Prof. Wurtz says, in Modem Chemistry : " We must 
believe that the atoms of any element are endowed with 
motion, and chemical energy then becomes atomic mo- 
tion. . . . When two elements manifest energetic 
affinities for each other, it is because their atoms are 
moving in such a manner that a portion of the atomic 
motion may be arrested ; this atomic energy is then trans- 
formed into heat energy or molecular motion." ' The 
type here is obviously that of translation ; and the atom 
may lose its motion, which, transformed into heat, may 
be radiated elsewhere. No distinct provision is made for 
the atoms retaining the " energy equivalent " of the lost 
motion in some other definite form. That it does retain 
this equivalent energy is evident, since when again dissoci- 
ated, that can only be accomplished by its absorbing as 
much heat as it gave up on entering the combined 
state. 

Prof. Wurtz continues : " Atomic energy — that is, affini- 
ty — must be a function of temperature, since the atomic 
vibrations of the elements may be so varied by an absorp- 
tion of energy from external sources that, on one hand, 
the motions of atoms manifesting little affinity for each 
other may be so harmonized that combination must take 
place, and, on the other, the harmonious movements of 
unlike atoms may be rendered so incompatible that those 
atoms will separate, finding conditions of more stable 
equilibrium in molecules of the elementary substances. 

" In this manner we can readily interpret those cases in 
which decomposition is attended by a development of 
energy, as with hydrogen dioxide, nitrogen iodide, and 
many other compounds." 

1 Modern Chemistry, p. 231. 



SUMMING UP. 203 

We should say, rather, that temperature is a function 
of atomic elements. It is one mode in which these 
atomic changes co-operate both amongst themselves and 
with outside co-working changes, and all exchanges of 
motion on both sides are mathematical equals. The Pro- 
fessor admits that "while all chemical action must be 
referred to atomic motion, the manner of that motion 
cannot at present be fully understood." 

In the absence of real knowledge as to atomic opera- 
tions or co-operations, the theory which can best explain 
the limitless multiplicity of processes is the best until 
further developments lead to still broader inferences. 
Arrest of atomic mass-translation may be transformed 
into heat energy, but so may the arrest of vibration in 
any atomic part ; and the compounding of several atoms 
into apparently one homogeneous substance, as a compo- 
sition of oppositely directed fluent motions which in part 
mutually arrest each other and dissipate a corresponding 
amount of heat, can be more easily comprehended than 
can the indefinite : " moving in such a manner that a por- 
tion of the atomic motion may be arrested." 

In what conceivable manner can two or more bodies of 
" fixed " forms, except by contact, direct or indirect, arrest 
some portion of each other's motions ? It is agreed that 
in no known process do atomic centres come even ap- 
proximately into contact. There arises at once the neces- 
sity for a mobile cushion of some kind to mediate between 
the atoms of fixed forms. It must be able to arrest, to 
transform, and to dissipate the transformed heat, and 
as the atoms are of unchanged form, it must become 
stressed. 

Sir Wm. Thomson says : " It is scarcely possible to help 
anticipating in idea the arrival at a complete theory of 
matter in which all of its properties will be seen to be 
merely attributes of motion." He affirms : " We must 
look distinctly on each molecule as being either a little 



204 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

elastic solid, or a configuration of motion in a continuous, 
all-pervading liquid. I do not myself," he adds, " see how 
we can ever permanently rest anywhere short of this last 
view." 1 It is well known that the Helmholtz-Thomson 
hypothetical least element of matter is a vortex-ring of 
motion which endlessly rotates in a universal ether, the 
" liquid," which is also the medium for the transmission 
of light and heat. 

Originally the ether hypothesis was an attempt to de- 
vise a continuity which could transmit radiated energy by 
means of wave-motion ; but it proved inadequate to ex- 
plain all radiative phenomena, and is rapidly losing pres- 
tige as an elastic plenum. 

The vortex ring of pure motion still requires a sustaining, 
presumably structureless fluid, differently related in con- 
stitution, but co-operative with the vortices. J. J. Thom- 
son has worked out the vortex-ring theory in a chemical 
direction. He thinks that two rings of motion coming 
into contact with about the same velocity would remain 
together, forming a dyad system, three a triad, four a 
tetrad. The learned brothers mathematically demonstrate 
the possibility — high scientific authorities believe the 
probability — that all matter is composed of such inde- 
structible whorls of motion. 

But two physical substances fundamentally unlike 
structurally, yet both " relatives " and co-operative, to say 
the least are discredited and improbable in the absence of 
direct proof. 

Then it is not easy to find any thinkable method by 
which such vortices, with or without the aid of a mediat- 
ing, bedrock-ether, can produce all of the existing varieties 
of physical process. Many of nature's movements are 
rotary or gyratory. But with any theory of an immuta- 
ble motion-atom equilibrated about a common centre of 

1 Opening address of Mathematical and Physical Section of British 
Association at Montreal. 



SUMMING UP. 205 

gravity, but capable of various polarizations or transposi- 
tions of vibratory paths, provided the equipoise is perpetu- 
ally maintained, would readily lend itself to any form of 
rotary or spiral co-operation. Every fluid and semi-fluid 
substance takes the form of a sphere whenever the condi- 
tions permit, and where they do not permit the fluid surface 
rounds perceptibly in form ; if there were no counteractive 
effect at the edges of the containing vessel the spherical 
tendency would be still more manifest. But a perfect 
sphere becomes rotary with the least outside provocation. 

An unsymmetrical moving body may be made to revolve 
in the maintenance of its own equilibrium. But no rotary 
motion is more a purely internal process than is the 
comparatively straight-line movement of a mass. It can 
arise only with outside co-operation ; and all primary 
action pertaining to an atom of pure motion must be 
intra-atomic. All inter-atomic processes should equally 
arise from co-operative but purely intra-atomic energizing. 
Thus, all motion, in the last analysis, is atomic. 

The vortex-ring atom — the most promising atomic the- 
ory extant — retains the supposition of motion " impressed 
upon " or given to a non-reciprocal fluid. The atom of 
correlated motion suggests a method by which motion in 
the atom is inherently necessitated and originated as a 
generic method of change — as motion. The method is 
conditioned, and the power acts under those established 
conditions. The modes are originated ; the essence, sub- 
stance per se, or substratum — power or force — is persistent 
energy, which is brought into exercise under the limitations 
of those conditioned modes. The modes are correlative ; 
the force, in this unqualified sense, belongs to non-rela- 
tive existence. 

But a rhythmic atom of the correlated type can lend 
itself with equal readiness to all possible varieties of 
motion through adapted co-operations ; and there is the 
added advantage of but one order of motion and that 



206 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

inherently compelled and maintained. All vibrators are 
" points of application." 

There is a later theory that the ether is motion of the 
type of a " vortex sponge " — a complicated system of 
whorls within whorls, vortices enclosed in other vortices, 
as the world is enveloped in its atmosphere, — and that 
enfolding vortex or series of vortices is a still more rare- 
fied or fluent motion. But whose vision is penetrating 
and distinct enough to attempt to indicate the co-opera- 
tive processes of a matter constituted by a scheme so 
involved and so difficult to discriminate as to details of 
method ? Such wheels within wheels — all of motion — 
doubtless might evolve the existing Cosmos of free 
motions and tensions in their countless differenced mani- 
festations, but a possible and conceivable how of such 
evolutions is not easy to realize with definiteness. 

All theories of ultimate physical structure have origi- 
nated as attempts to explain the nature of co-operation 
between matter and matter — between atomic centres 
which admittedly are remote and never in contact. 

As force cannot be thought to act where it is not, some- 
thing must mediate between separated bodies. Hence 
atmospheres, ethers, electric specific " charges on " each 
atom, active forces engineering elastic solids, etc. The 
rhythmic atom with its outreaching vibrators is of the 
same character ; but it has the advantage of being one 
correlative system adequate to itself in every emergency ; 
able to evolve all processes, and throughout physical 
nature of one genus, though perhaps of many species. 

Ampere had a theory that each individual molecule of 
a magnetic substance is traversed by a closed electric 
current — the currents being free to move about their 
centres of motion unless prevented by a " coercive " force. 
All foreign currents, like the electric charge on the atom, 
seem superfluous. Then the charge must be both positive 
and negative, as the same atom is positive to one sub- 



SUMMING UP. 207 

stance but negative to another. It is these like charges 
which are supposed to be mutually repulsive, and the 
unlike charges which are mutually attractive. To say 
nothing of the degradation of the atomic nuclei thus 
passively remanded to the condition of dummies — 
engineered by their riders who do the active work in 
much the same way presumably that a bicycler does — 
who can think in what way the atoms are supposed to 
put on or to take off these electric charges, how the 
charges work with each other, or what either the charges 
or the atoms are as conditioned beings? Each atom 
should do its own work whatever that may be. 

More recently there is a growing disposition to identify 
all other processes and their methods with electricity and 
its modes. Clerk Maxwell by his theory of the trans- 
mission of light led the way in that direction with 
immense force of acceleration. Faraday's law, that 
when the same quantity of electricity passes through an 
electrolyte, it always sets free or transfers to other com- 
binations the same number of units of affinity at both 
electrodes, is experimentally demonstrable and necessary 
in theory. But frictional electricity begins with an 
inequality, and polarization is re-established equilibrium. 

And is it the electricity that decides the equivalence 
of the oppositely directed forces which present themselves 
at the electrodes, or did the same equal energies enter 
into the chemical union, which electricity only disso- 
ciates, subsequently impelling the disunited elements in 
the direction of their rhythmic adaptations ? The latter 
explanation is equally efficient in accounting for the very 
beautiful complex results. Helmholtz argues that on 
the Dalton hypothesis of the atom we cannot avoid the 
conclusion that " electricity, both positive and negative, 
is divided into elementary portions which behave like 
atoms of electricity " — (our doubly directed rhythm). 

How much simpler, then, to postulate one effective 



208 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

type of primary atoms which by their differenced co-opera- 
tions can engineer all possible phenomena. Helmholtz 
claims that the electric charge on the atoms is "71,000 
billions times larger than gravitation between the same 
atoms " — which would only go to prove that the innate 
energy of atoms is unthinkably greater than the excess 
of tension pull over free-motion push even in the densest 
combinations. 

Maxwell's electro-magnetic theory of light, which utilizes 
" oppositely directed energies " in each half of the wave- 
length of light and heat, would be a broader hypothesis 
if he assumed oppositely directed energies in all primary 
matter, with successive alternations in both directions, 
and if he transferred his energy through each atom in a 
continuous flow alternately along a retracting and an 
elongating axis of motion surrounded by its small 
" magnetic whirlpools " — the equivalent of the transverse 
motion of the rhythmic vibrations. 

The real problem is not : In what way does continuous 
matter transmit energy ; it is : In what way does discon- 
tinuous matter transmit energy with no break in the con- 
tinuous onflow ? Whether the transmitting medium be 
the ether, the earth's atmosphere, or the earth itself, the 
method should be generically the same. 

Doubtless the method may be considered electro- 
magnetic in its leading features. Hertz is demonstrat- 
ing that there is " identity of light and electricity " in 
the sense that both are free motions which can be trans- 
ferred continuously from one place to another far distant 
by processes closely analogous. But the methods of trans- 
mission are distinct as species. Free electricity must 
always be moved in a closed circuit — in a species of in- 
sulated tube open for its free passage onward, but closed 
against its too frequent divergence at the sides; but 
radiated light, moving on indefinite practically straight 
lines, has yet an open pathway on all sides, being entirely 



SUMMING UP. 209 

at liberty to move to right or left when anything is inter- 
posed to cause divergence. 

Then though all free motions may be turned back 
towards whence they came by any reflecting obstacle, and 
though probably if another sun of the size of the earth 
were here to radiate as well as to receive heat, the ether 
would transfer the energy sunward as readily as it now 
does earthward, yet there would be an unfenced path in 
both directions. But free electricity moves in its enclosed 
as well as in a closed path in both directions. Nature 
and artificial ingenuity alike vdo their best to insulate all 
electrical phenomena. The current is hedged in as 
really as the insulated static charge. 

In the transference of light there seems to be a species 
of insulation which may be supposed to differ from the 
electrical method something as intra-atomic co-operation 
differs from inter-atomic co-operation. The light and 
heat insulation arises largely, if not wholly, from internal 
mutual limitations. The hypothesis assumes that the 
bundle of energies called the beam of light moves on 
through the different vibrators of the same atom, and 
along one axial line, upon which the successive atomic 
centres are situated, unless switched off by something out- 
side of the regular economy of transmission. 

In this way a definite amount of energy is carried 
forward from point to point and an equally fixed amount 
is converted into the reversed tensions along each stage 
of the route unless interfered with from outside. And 
yet the way is entirely open for any amount of switching 
off upon side tracks ; so that as soon as the line of travel 
enters the earth's atmosphere, there is a large amount 
both of absorption and of reflection of the travelling 
energy, caused by floating foreign matter, etc. 

But in electrical conduction the insulation arises from 
external co-operation chiefly ; and with good conditions 
the same amount of energy should be and is bound to be 



2IO THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

conveyed over every part of a homogeneous circuit. Thus 
light and electricity, though of the same genus, are yet 
very unlike as species. 

Instead of attempting to reduce all phenomena to the 
action of electricity, which is itself not one but several 
co-operative methods so unlike that they cannot even be 
called so many varieties of the same class — though all of 
them with unique similarities to be found in no other 
processes to the same extent, — it would be immensely 
simpler to reduce all processes, static and dynamic, to 
the one principle of correlated co-operation, internal or 
external. 

One may reason incorrectly from partial data, but all 
electrical or magnetic process seems to be attended by a 
torsion of vibratory paths, by special methods of dis- 
placement in atomic action, which sends all simultaneous 
energy of one vibratory phase in one direction (or if 
static holds it in tension so directed), and all simultaneous 
energy of reverse phase in the reverse direction ; but in 
all other processes of all kinds, even in that of polarized 
light, so far as appears, there is action simultaneously 
in opposed directions. Where there is free motion to be 
transmitted one way, its local effects to be counteracted 
by opposed tension, the rapid rhythmic reversals do not 
allow of direct testing of the method. But there are in- 
direct tests. 

Light, though scattered in all directions, is never found 
to turn backwards towards its source except as reflected 
from some obstacle, and so of all other energies except 
those which move along the closed circuit, which is equally 
available both ways, and which by its concentration shows 
that with normal conditions there is a nearly complete 
turning of one moiety one way, and the other in the 
opposite direction, in an ordinary conductor as in elec- 
trolytic action. 

Then electric attractions and repulsions show the same 



SUMMING UP. 211 

distinct separation, and are in tense accord with the 
theory. But all other local attractions and repulsions 
neutralize each other in most ordinary substances, as they 
would if every vibrator had a complementary giving a 
push at the precise instant of its pull. Only where mat- 
ter is extremely dense and the pull exceeds the push can 
local attraction be manifested by non-electrified matter, 
and only where, as in gases, free motion is active is repul- 
sion manifested in non-electrified matter. 

The sudden discharge of electricity in a condensed 
flash is unlike the giving up of any other free motion. A 
heated body can only be cooled gradually. An electrified 
surface is de-electrized in an instant, showing a wholly dif- 
ferent kind of stress from the normal. 

The extra electrification of points, the opposite elec- 
tricity of the two sides or ends of a body, show a like con- 
densation in direction which no other surfaces have. The 
sudden change from positive to negative electricity some- 
times effected unwittingly, and the repulsion which follows 
so closely the attraction of light bodies, indicate that the 
two electricities, so-called, are but the two halves of the 
same vibration, and that electrical process, unlike all other 
processes, has effected a condensed separation in both 
directions. 

Our conclusion is that it is illogical to attempt to ex- 
plain other phenomena by electricity, though we may 
reduce all sensible processes legitimately to a common 
but various inter-atonic co-operation. By what really 
thinkable device could an ether without an open atomic 
structure keep the numberless differenced vibratory lines 
of transmission so accurately distinct ? A homogeneous 
ether wave-theory has not been able to do this satisfac- 
torily. Light, heat, sound, chemical energy, and the 
internal co-operations of all masses, all physical processes 
whatever, must be interpreted as atomic and as co-opera- 
tive through some mode of recurrent motion. 



212 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

While the atoms are individualized and discrete, there 
is yet an evident working continuity as perfect as though 
relative matter was a plenum. The successive vibratory 
motion of atomic parts can amply account for this class 
of phenomena, but without some equivalent explanation 
disparate suggestions made to account for certain groups 
and kinds of processes are of little avail, and are often more 
bewildering than helpful. We must find some broader uni- 
fication of matter and all of its properties and processes. 

Prof. Lodge suggests both a positive and a negative 
ether substantially identical with positive and negative 
electricity — each of which tends to do exactly the reverse 
of the other ; in this way producing stresses and other 
opposed co-operations. In some unknown way, different 
substances, differently " load " or condense the double- 
sided, the double-natured ether, thus producing phe- 
nomena of various electrical action. But, confessedly, 
this is an explanation which does not claim fully to 
explain. It but suggests analogies and possibilities. 

With Maxwell and Rankine, it concedes the necessity 
of recognizing that in the larger part of all processes some 
kind of recurrently reversed action must be intelligently 
accounted for ; and it suspects that there is one under- 
lying principle somewhere, which, if found, would unify 
all such reversals. 

Like Faraday and Maxwell, Dr. Lodge thinks that the 
dielectric surrounding the conductor is the seat of most 
electrical interest and of most effectiveness. The con- 
ductor, he considers a mere break in the electrical 
continuity of strains or tensions in the ether. (All free 
motions are a breaking away from the check of their 
tension.) But Lodge declares with positiveness : " Elec- 
tricity may possibly be a form of matter — it is not a form 
of energy." ' The static electric condition seems to best 
represent his conception of electricity. 

1 Modern Views of Electricity. 



SUMMING UP. 21 3 

When utilized for work, electricity is regarded as a 
form of energy working in accordance with established 
laws and methods. Latterly it seems to be regarded as a 
peculiar group of relations pertaining to the ether, to 
common matter, or to both, most effective in transferring 
energy to places where it can be best used to advantage. 
Since matter in all of its states and methods, in our view, 
is properly and purely the energy of motion and never at 
rest, the states of electrification, positive and negative, 
and the transmitted energy, either or both, may be 
regarded as electricity. The name may be applied either 
to electric tensions, to the energy of the current, or to the 
peculiar method by which the energy is transmitted. 
The older usage approximates about equally near to these 
different phases of one comprehensive class. 

If a conductor is virtually a porous substance which 
may be filled from end to end with electricity — that is, 
filled with the ether, or perhaps with a positive and a 
negative ether, which may be crowded on as water falls 
from a higher to a lower level, Dr. Lodge may properly 
call this a "locomotion of electricity." Such an electricity 
might become somehow entangled in a dielectric, some- 
thing as water is enclosed in a jelly so that it cannot flow; 
but being partially displaced, such displacements would 
produce ether stresses. This ether or electricity would 
be " moved and strained like matter " while so entangled. 
This is the now favorite theory. 

But entanglements of a simpler but similar kind would 
arise between the dielectric vibrators subjected to the 
right conditions and electricity as free energy mediating 
between positive and negative electrifications and the 
energy transmitted by conductors ; if supposed to be 
generically like other free motions, this would greatly 
simplify and unify the whole theory of energy transfer- 
ence as well as the theory of electricity. But if the flow 
of an electric current is like the downward flow of water 



214 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

through a full tube, how shall the simultaneous transmis- 
sion in both directions be explained? How shall the 
electric transmission of sound be explained ? 

The rhythmic atom and its methods of co-operation- 
complex though they are and difficult to accept at the 
outset — are simplicity itself compared with the manifold 
devices adopted in explanation of the still greater multi- 
plicity of phenomena. 

President Fitzgerald said in his Bath address to the 
British Association : " It has become the fashion to in- 
dulge in quaint cosmical theories, and to dilate upon 
them before learned societies and in learned journals." 

But in this fashion of the savants is an intense, pro- 
longed search after the reconciling truths which must 
underly all things. The laurels of one Miltiades may 
hinder the inglorious rest of many others. These are 
not men who toil for empty honors. They have searched 
for realities in fields where, since the actual exists, more 
and more of it must certainly be discovered. The 
attempt to explain is some of the best fruit of the human 
outreach into the unknown in the search after those 
realities which may yet become known. 

The need for some solvent, for some broad uniting 
principle which shall make all processes more closely 
kindred, becomes imperative. More recently, serious 
effort has been made to reduce intermolecular co-opera- 
tions to one general type — that of an always mutually 
attractive force. Sir William Thomson and William 
Sutherland argue that attraction can be made to produce 
apparent repulsions by various interpenetrations. Suther- 
land formulates the law of molecules as one and universal: 
" Any two molecules of matter attract one another with 
a force proportionate directly to the product of their 
masses and inversely to the fourth power of the distance 
between them." 

Through the intermingling and " interlinking " of the 



SUMMING UP. 215 

surface molecules of bodies in contact, attractions may be 
made to appear negatively attractive or repulsive and the 
pull may have the seeming effect of a push. This effort 
to prove that " molic " force may be homogeneous in 
kind is most suggestive. It is equally feasible to argue 
that the type of molic force is repulsive ; that any two 
molecules of matter repel one another with a force pro- 
portionate directly to the product of their masses and 
inversely to the fourth power of the distance between 
them " ; as shown by the tendency of all gaseous particles 
to spread themselves over any confined space, however 
large, to which they may be assigned ; and the interlink- 
ing of surface molecules might explain the appearance of 
negative repulsion. Attraction of gravitation between 
sun and earth has been supposed to result from the push 
of outside swarming particles. 

But force, power, energy, taken in its broadest signifi- 
cation, is immeasurably more than either direct attractions 
or repulsions. To use one's arm is to have power to move 
it, is to use power in moving it ; yet the motion is origi- 
nated neither by attraction, repulsion, nor by both associ- 
ated. To laugh is to use power as laughter ; to think 
requires power manifested in thought. Why not assume, 
then, that the conditions under which force is manifested 
in co-operations between molecule and molecule are con- 
ditions which demand neither attractions nor repulsions, 
but are neutral towards both modes or tendencies. Then, 
the one being the reverse of the other, the possible inter- 
minglings and interlinkings may result either in direct 
attractions or repulsions, though either effect must call 
out an equivalent reaction of the opposed mode either 
directly or indirectly. 

The ether seems to be in a state and position in which 
there is neither attraction nor repulsion between the par- 
ticles. They manifest no tendency either to draw together 
or to fly apart ; no appreciable weight ; yet they must be 



2l6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

the transmitters of the gravitative tendency, as we know 
that they are of the repulsive or outpushing tendency of 
the free motions. 

The law of gravitation is a perfect expression of the 
action between bodies which have an excess of tensions ; 
but between those which have an excess of free motion a 
parallel law of repulsion would be equally accurate. These 
results are more or less complicated by changes of " state " 
between solids, liquids, and gases, and by the character of 
collisions from translation and of the radiative process ; 
but wherever the co-operation between attractions and 
repulsions is not direct, it is indirect, and the two types 
remain constant working equivalents. The conclusion is 
that if all matter were reduced to its primary condition 
there would be neither attraction nor repulsion between 
any two molecules until some of their vibrators were again 
brought into inter-atomic co-operation. 

Rarefied matter becomes radiant under the influence of 
a sunbeam. Professor Crookes has shown that it can be 
made to do visible mechanical work with only the sun- 
beams to give it kinetic power. But all radiation, whether 
of tensions or of free motion, or of the two in balanced 
combination, as in the ether of a vacuum, is one in prin- 
ciple. Gaseous particles, at the puff of a breath, are blown 
onward, as thistle-down before the wind. The evaporation 
of particles from the surface of water, so rapidly increased 
by heat from below, is only a form of radiation from 
the denser into the rarer medium. Red-hot iron particles 
do not easily expand into iron vapor and help to push 
themselves off through the less dense atmosphere, but 
even that may occur if given enough concentrated impul- 
sion. But they more readily send off the surplus heat 
into the air ; and it is this heat, as free motion, that 
becomes radiated. 

In electrolytic action there may be radiation through a 
liquid or through the air. Between the electrodes there 



SUMMING UP. 217 

may even be radiation both ways simultaneously, pre- 
sumably of the broken-off still solid small masses. The 
running stream is a current of virtually radiated water, 
and a granite boulder on the edge of a precipice can be 
made to radiate in an on-going and down-going plunge 
to the bottom. Masses go forward, carrying all of their 
internal motions with them, but free motions move from 
their own tensions to other tensions, and then move on 
with their movements. But in the same sense in which 
Professor Crookes' vacuum matter is radiant, all matter 
is radiant — given the adjusted conditions. 

The granite boulder, crowded against the base of mas- 
sive rock, hands on the impulsion, and remains where it 
is ; but the radiating energy goes forward all the same — 
on, on through the rock somewhere. When the blow is 
given at one end of a long row of blocks, they all remain 
in place until the last one is reached, but that one topples 
over on its face. Thus radiation, whether of mass or of 
free motion, is essentially one. It is the out-going phase of 
all energy, whether combined or uncombined. 

Newly generated free motions tend to travel away from 
the bodies which set them into action. Coal and oxygen 
transform themselves into carbon dioxide, but the evolved 
heat does not largely follow the fortunes of the new sub- 
stance ; it moves along invisible lines to the nearest sub- 
stance of more solidity which will absorb it, either with 
or without speedy commutation to other modes. The 
heat must follow its acquired tendency to push on and 
out — in other words, to be a radiating mode of force until 
captured and redirected. Heat of low grade remains with 
the tensions. 

No one attributes any real opposition of properties to 
the wind, whether it is acting helpfully or hinderingly to 
the ship's progress. By a little management of sails, the 
same wind can be made to do either kind of work, or first 
one and then the other in repeated succession. In the 



218 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

light of all rhythmic motion interpretation, it is equally 
illogical to attribute any real opposition of properties to 
radiation and gravitation. They are differently utilized 
at the moment. They are oppositely directed — that is all. 

" The principle of conservation of energy asserts that 
the whole amount of energy in the universe, or in any 
limited system which does not receive energy from with- 
out, or part with it to external nature, is invariable. ,, * 
But if any atomic theory can be sustained, whatever form 
of energy the atom may be supposed to take, does it not 
follow that these least units of matter can neither receive 
energy from without nor part with it to external nature ? 
The atoms exchange modes, not quantities. The principle 
of conservation constitutes them indestructible amounts 
of energizing. 

The day has gone by for holding that atoms are pas- 
sive solids engineered by something outside of themselves, 
called energy, force, or power. Even atomic materialists 
locate energy inseparably in the mass ; but we argue from 
the phenomena of nature that mass must be the product 
of oppositely directed energies so dependency adjusted 
in time and space that they together originate a variable 
stress, or tension, in connection with the periodic vibra- 
tions, which endlessly repeat themselves with changes of 
form but without change of quantity. A correlated group 
of such motions with allied stress is the indivisible ultimate 
atom with constant mass. 

As the power of doing work is estimated, " force is 
merely the rate at which energy is transferred, or the 
rate at which it would be transferred or transformed, if 
some obstacle were removed." This definition of Pro- 
fessor Tait treats force and energy as definitely graduated 
motion. Opposed actions may be so pitted against each 
other that each becomes the " obstacle " to the other's 
normal motion. The result is apparent rest, static equilib- 

1 Professor Tait. 



SUMMING UP. 219 

rium. Define this state of tension to be opposed, per- 
fectly equilibrated motion, — apparent rest, rest to our not 
closely discriminating senses ; to be in reality motion so 
condensed, so tense, that it is the equivalent of much 
freer motions vibrating in much longer lineal spaces. 

Professor Maxwell represents vibrations in a ray of 
light — such as are made visible in the spectrum (prob- 
ably not in single vibrations but in a series of a like kind) 
— to be some action and its exactly reversed action, the 
two making one wave or cycle, and the cycles recurring 
in periodic succession. He attributes this reversal to 
oppositely directed conditions of some kind, probably to 
oppositely directed " magnetizations and electromotive 
forces." Professor Rankine suggests opposite rotations 
of molecules about their axes ; and the older wave-theory 
assumes that there are to-and-fro motions of some kind. 
Thus it is admitted by all that there must be — that in 
light there visibly is — reversed action of some definite 
variety. The reversed action in every element of our 
primary motion belongs to the same class of explanations 
with all of these. 

It is but following the lead of high authorities to assume 
that oppositely directed conditions may produce periodi- 
cally reversed action. If the conditions act co-operately 
and recurrently but in opposed directions — as they do in 
all visible vibrations — the result must be like that assumed 
to exist in each ultimate vibration of atomic matter, an 
effect of alternately predominating tensions and free 
motions in each half vibration. While the wind is bend- 
ing the tree-top, the tree steadily resists. After a time it 
is able to assert itself against the wind with a visible push 
in the opposite direction. 

Such repeated swaying to and fro is the type of all 
primary motion ; as, under a diversity of more and less 
modified forms, it is the type of all compound motion. 

Mass into motion gives the product energy. The small 



220 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

mass with rapid motion equals the large mass with slow 
motion. Building on this foundation there needs only a 
steady consistency to bring one to the conclusion that 
mass is the product of motion into motion. 

When work is defined to be change in mass, or the 
translation of mass (mass here being the equivalent of 
tension), and force is defined " the power of doing work," 
energy is narrowed in its functions and is very nearly 
equivalent to our free motion — " available energy " it 
has been called. The total power or energy of the uni- 
verse is not thought to be synonymous with the available 
energy, the " entropy," " motivity," or work-doing force ; 
yet it is maintained that this available working energy, 
free motion, steadily tends to zero. In the light of this 
theorizing, based upon the Baconian idea of motion as 
mass-progression, we are told " that in the future we have 
to contemplate a moment at which the whole physical 
universe will have run itself down like the weights of a 
clock, and after which an inert, uniformly warm mass will 
represent the whole material order of things." ' 

It has been found, in theory and in practice, that, under 
the best possible conditions, while work or mass-change 
can be wholly converted into heat that heat can never 
be wholly converted into work ; and that no form of 
energy can be transformed into some other mode without 
some portion of the amount contriving to elude the 
desired form and changing itself into heat. The philos- 
ophers call that change into heat " the degradation of the 
energy " into the lowest, the non-available form of energy 
— a dead level of uniform heat with hopeless stagnation, 
unless some new crises intervene to restore the old lively 
activity. Much of this degraded heat, as it is originated, 
is supposed to drift into Professor Tait's waste-heap of 
the universe. 

But this " degraded " heat, not available for present 

1 Principles of Physics, by Alfred Daniel], p. 50. 



SUMMING UP, . 221 

transformation, remains as the free motion of the vibra- 
tors. In the process of transforming free energy into 
useful work, of course the accompanying tensions, when 
possible, greedily absorb the heat or any free motion in 
whatever form it comes. This is but so much successful 
effort in the direction of a freer activity. Even very hot 
bodies are absorbents of a still hotter kindred energy ; 
so that the same body may be actively absorbing heat 
upon one side and as actively radiating it on the other. 
The absorption spectrum is a visible indication of the 
tendency to take up all available free motion ; and the 
lost heat which accompanies, more or less, all trans- 
formation of modes, is lost for sensible work, but gained 
as insensible vibratory activity. So much tension is re- 
laxed. Something is gained towards a restoration to 
atomic freedom represented by the absorbed heat. If 
all modes of free energy could be converted into this 
insensible heat, perfectly and simultaneously, we should 
only be back again where the universe probably was " in 
the beginning." Every atom would be uncombined ; but 
it would be vibrating vigorously according to the condi- 
tions of its own constitution. If there was so little co- 
operation outside that it need never touch any other 
system, it would simply go on vibrating harmonically. 

But to touch means to co-operate. Since contact has 
occurred, doubtless contact would again occur. The 
whole process would begin over again ; we should finally 
arrive at about where we are to-day ; where normal vibra- 
tion is continually transforming itself into tension, where 
tension is getting moved on and made to work with out- 
side allies according to the nature of its particular struc- 
ture, and where work is getting transformed back again 
into free vibration. 

Heat is radiated as surplus motion by the tension- 
forming masses ; but if it never radiates away from other 
tensions, they either transmit it transformed or untrans- 



222 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

formed, or absorb it themselves — giving up an equivalent 
of stress in exchange. The dimensions of the cosmos 
are established ; a cessation of ever-efficient activity is a 
constitutional impossibility. 

The more complex motions can be wholly converted 
into heat, because that more nearly than other sensible 
mode is simple and normal vibration ; but of course the 
attempt to convert this simplest mode into any form of 
work engineered by men must be partial failure, since 
free motion cannot be wholly eliminated from any process, 
and in all dense matter there is the inherent tendency to 
absorb any available free motion. But if convertibility is 
not destructibility, correlated physical process can know 
no rest, no diminution ; and, strictly interpreted, neither 
evolution nor dissolution in itself considered, as process 
independent of mind. But most certainly no possible 
stagnation can arise. 

Visible motion may appear to move uniformly, but the 
friction and gravitation, by which it is retarded and 
brought to a visible end, are themselves motions, com- 
pounding and re-compounding themselves in a complex 
of intermingled vibratory activity, at every moment in 
close co-operation with the onward translation. Every 
moving body, internally a world of endless co-operations, 
invisible to the most powerful microscope, like the same 
class of surface vibrations, yet a domain of the most 
orderly and methodical activity, where, in every least 
atom, is maintained a perfect local equipoise in which no 
line of energizing, whether lengthening or retracting, con- 
fuses itself and its work in the least degree with its neigh- 
bor or with its neighbor's processes, is yet a world of the 
most rigid mathematical, active correlations, no least 
phase working in isolation. 

We may fairly assume that every part is not only co- 
operative in some degree with every other, but more and 
less indirectly is in active co-operation with the immediate 



SUMMING UP. 223 

environment, and with the remotest portions of the uni- 
versal whole. A moving body is thus no more dissociated 
from the surrounding medium than one foot of land is 
from the surrounding acre. But this can only mean that 
through co-operation between the body and environment 
the motion of translation is steadily being transformed in 
part into internal as well as external heat. Also, if the 
medium were removed and the body moving in other- 
wise empty space, the highly complex motion of trans- 
lation — a free motion of its own kind — must tend to 
loosen the somewhat abnormal tensions of the dense 
mass in some definite manner, until in time the whole 
motion of translation would have become a freer internal 
vibratory activity. 

The rhythm of nature has been strikingly and com- 
prehensively characterized by Spencer, who attributes all 
rhythm to the " conflict of forces not in equilibrium." 
He says : " If the antagonist forces at any point are bal- 
anced, there is rest ; and in the absence of motion there 
can of course be no rhythm." 1 

There, as generally, the idea of motion is that of mass- 
translation ; mass and motion are two and not one in 
kind, and equilibrium is that balance of forces producing 
rest which is the current conception of the nature of 
equilibrium. It seems hardly needful to reiterate that 
such equilibration (unless the words misrepresent the 
thought) must be a conception derived from undis- 
criminated sense testimony — " testimony in the lump " 
— not yet fully reinterpreted in all its bearings by the 
intellect. A pair of scales of equal weight are in perfect 
rest to sensation ; but they are in perpetual motion to the 
eye of reason — of course not mass but molecular motion. 
The fundamental explanation of the lever, whose long 
arm and small weight balance the short arm and large 
weight, is, that opposed forces on either side of the 

1 First Principles, p. 254. 



224 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

centre of gravity are equal ; but no physicist can believe 
that these forces are inoperative or asleep. He knows 
that there is some kind of continuous molecular co-opera- 
tion in process, and that the outcome of this insensible 
activity can be only the apparent inaction of the apparently 
inert and solid masses. And most physicists know that 
all physical action is some related kind of change in space 
and time — that is, some kind of motion exclusively. 

Mr. Spencer is quite as fully aware of all this as most 
others, but is he or are they consistent throughout in ap- 
plying that knowledge? He says of mass momentum: 
" It must either continue as momentum, or produce some 
correlative force of equal amount. It cannot continue 
as momentum, since change of place is resisted by the 
cohesion of the parts, and thus it gradually disappears 
by being transformed into tension among these parts. 
This is retransformed into the equivalent momentum ; 
and so on continuously." 1 

This is perfect rhythmic-atom philosophy. The force 
is alternately manifested as free motion and tension. All 
physical force is so manifested. But Mr. Spencer con- 
cludes his admirable paper by saying: " The only condi- 
tion under which there could be absence of rhythm — 
the only condition, that is, under which there could be 
a continuous motion through space in the same straight 
line forever, would be the existence of an infinity void 
of everything but the moving body. And neither of these 
conditions can be represented in thought." 

But our philosopher, to be self-consistent, should see 
that, since tension and free motion are mutually con- 
vertible, both are motion in differenced modes, and that 
free motion " resisted," whether by " cohesion of parts " 
or by opposed free motion, must become tension. As 
the apostle of correlativity, he might have inferred that 
tension and mass are one and the same, when by mass 

1 First Principles , p. 270. 



SUMMING UP, 225 

we mean condensed matter ; and that motion per se is 
opposed co-operation in time and space, in which free 
motion is either always being converted into tension or 
tension into free motion ; that the ultimate atom, the unit 
of relative being, must be constituted in some way by cor- 
related changes of this sort ; that all compounded and 
recompounded rhythms are the legitimate outcome of 
interaction conducted upon that one principle ; and that 
even though but one compound body, compounded of 
such units, should be started forward in a void space with 
no outside friction to eat up its motion, yet that the 
internal co-operations would inevitably do so in time. 
The abnormal mass-motion would be reconverted into the 
normal atomic vibrations ; or, if not enough translatory 
motion had been communicated to dissociate it, molecular 
vibration would redistribute the compound translation. 

It must in time be fully conceded that motion is always 
a process of commutation between free motion and ten- 
sion. Consistency requires this at the hands of all 
advanced physicists. Mr. Spencer's argument for com- 
pound motion is complete enough, but primary motion 
must be in some way explained to belong to the same 
category. Tension " among the parts " must be accepted 
as tension of the parts. 

The equilibrium of sensible rest arises when all the 
movable parts on either side of a sustained centre of 
gravity are equal, but sensible motion arises whenever the 
equilibrium of motion requires that change. In the sensible 
rest all of the equilibrating motions are insensible ; in the 
sensible motion, that portion of the equilibrating motion 
which translates the allied tensions without dissociation is 
visible motion, but the other portion, which also works in 
the interest of a continuous active equilibration, remains 
insensible motion ; and it is this latter portion which in 
time would reabsorb the sensible portion, even if it had 
no outside assistance. 



226 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

As the continuous transformation of free motion into 
tension, or vice versa, all motion is identical in kind, is one 
and the same generic process : but in that sense motion is 
not unstable ; it is the sole type of physical stability ; it 
stands for the persistingly homogeneous, and is the only 
homogeneity this side of the absolute. 

But motion in detail, motion as a process which is never 
the same for any two moments in succession, and which 
is so conditioned in individual systems that through their 
possible co-operations they may produce unlimited hetero- 
geneity, this differentiated motion process is the sole type 
of physical instability. It may seem paradoxical to say 
that the rhythm of nature arises not from the instability 
of the homogeneous, but from the stability of the hetero- 
geneous. It is really the stability of the unstable — in 
other words, recurrent innate rhythm of the primary 
atoms, which, by their many possible varieties of co-ope- 
rations and resulting modifications, produce all compound 
rhythms. 

The seeming paradox, like all paradoxes when compre- 
hensively enough explained, becomes transformed into one 
correlated truth. Thus all motion, as well as all rhythm 
of motion, arises from " the conflict of forces " bound 
to maintain an equilibrium between them, and therefore 
constrained to move in such ways as will secure that 
balanced or correlated result. With this interpretation, 
the nature of tensions and their equivalent freed motions, 
and of gravitation and its equivalent repulsion, as com- 
pounded and recompounded processes, become intelligible 
and necessary copartnerships. 

The need for using terms which originally stood for 
some theory now discredited is often not only mislead- 
ing to the reader, but it may stand in the way of clear 
thinking on the part of the writer. Thus if power or 
force is the total of all things, and, as manifested in motion, 
is the total of relative physical being, then the constant 



SUMMING UP. 227 

use of the terms which originated with the supposition 
that matter was a passive solid, unless most carefully 
hedged about by explanations or context, must almost 
necessarily lead to confusion of thought. 

All coupled motions are impelled through equivalent 
spaces in opposed directions, are proportional in quantity, 
and so related in time and space that they together meas- 
ure the stress jointly produced. With reversal they must 
be simultaneously reversed, and in every detail they work 
in exact correlation. In some sense our atomic vibrators 
may be regarded as related series of couples. If we could 
really look into their precise methods, these might prove 
to be extremely unlike our conception in all details, but 
the principle of correlation would still remain untouched. 

One motion without its correlate would be the bird 
flying without air, the ship sailing without water, the man 
walking with no foundation to walk upon ; but accept the 
working correlation of all motion and the most differenced 
processes become but the outgrowth of one consistent 
method. 

The uncombined or but little combined surface vibrators, 
which we have compared to cilia vibrating upon the out- 
side of the mass, and exchanging free motion with the 
environment, are but one phase of even surface phe- 
nomena. Regarded in another aspect, the much larger 
amount of tension at the surface of nearly all bodies than 
in their interiors becomes obvious. The rind of fruit 
and the skin of all tissues exposed to the air, even the 
more dense outside of some metals, are examples. Metal- 
lic surfaces when rubbed become polished, increasing in 
density, and a living surface exposed to friction becomes 
thickened and hardened. Can the usual theory of attrac- 
tive forces and repulsive forces do much towards explain- 
ing such phenomena ? 

But fluent lines of motion with their axes in the surface 
of the mass may either freely outray into space, exchan- 



228 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

ging heat, light, etc., with surrounding free vibrators, or 
they may become closely interlocked with each other 
when impelled either from within or without and forced 
into contact. We know that friction between masses 
whose surfaces have unlike amounts of " potential " seems 
to have the effect of setting free many interlocked ele- 
ments, yet the same friction crowds and condenses other 
elements into closer relations. If both results are simply 
mechanical, all difficulties vanish. The unseen opposite 
results are of the same kind with the two classes of sensi- 
ble results — some portion of the rubbed surface is worn 
away, but that which remains is crowded into a closer and 
firmer texture. 

Equal masses, cczter is paribus, have equal weight, equal 
inertia. The first Newtonian law of motion, claimed to 
be equivalent to the statement : matter has inertia, can 
be interpreted to mean that any mode or modes of co- 
operation, once in action, tend to continue the process 
provided the nature of the co-operation will permit. This 
virtually assumes that all composite processes where ten- 
sions are in the ascendant, external in part to the mass as 
well as internal, are equilibrated co-operations, repeating 
some recurrent transfer of modes in vibratory pulses. All 
such facts harmonize with the rhythmic-atom hypothesis. 
Free motions are exchanged quite invisibly to us, but 
when a room widely different in temperature becomes 
of uniform warmth we are compelled to attempt some 
explanation of the molecular method. 

The apparent passiveness of solid masses, their inertia, 
has been the great stumbling-block in the path towards 
clear thinking. Matter seemed to be a clod acted upon, 
force a mysterious actor, and motion the work done. Now 
granted that motion and its co-operative motion are both 
actors and both receivers, both motion yet both form and 
mass, though perhaps under very different conditions and 
appearances, then nature becomes a consistent working 



SUMMING UP. 229 

whole. All attributes and properties are modes of work- 
ing. The attempt to make them anything else must prove 
a failure. Nothing has a passive inertia. The term is 
a convenient symbol summing up in a negative form the 
active processes which must be overcome before any mass 
can be moved as a whole. 

Chemical action has been widely, curiously separated 
from all other forms of co-operation. The newly origi- 
nated substance often manifests a greatly modified internal 
structure with properties amazingly unlike those of either 
of the elements. To all outside observation of them gained 
through sensation they are inexplicably changed ; and 
the entire process has seemed mystical in the extreme. 
Here, visibly, one saw enacted a transformation spec- 
tacle more marvellous than any fairy tale. 

It is only recently that to the wisest the process was 
hidden enough to seem almost uncanny and generally 
tremendous in kind. Taking into account those super- 
human " affinities," seemingly emotional in their elective- 
ness and strong enough to break up close and staple 
alliances and to enter with tumultuous eagerness into 
more congenial relations, the whole process was most 
mysterious. Science frankly said, " We know nothing 
whatever about the nature of the forces at work " in chemi- 
cal and other molecular transformations. 

But theory and experimentation together have brought 
chemical energy into the fraternal circle with other free 
motions — as it is now bringing in free electricity. Affinity 
already means amount of energy available for co-operation 
in any compound. It is recognized that outside free motion 
of some kind is the stimulus which impels adapted elements 
to come together to form their own tensions with distri- 
bution of heat, as certainly as it is outside energy which 
drives one ball against another on the croquet ground — 
sending one ball out into the cold, and the other com- 
fortably through the wicket. 



230 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Management of a ship's sails in a wind neither 
directly for nor against its progress, makes the wind 
available as a propelling force ; so the chemist supplies 
momentum when that is needed, but the adaptations 
among the atomic vibrators themselves perfect the union 
which may be stable or otherwise as the elements become 
firmly or loosely woven into co-operation. Two or three 
differenced compounds may be formed at the same time, 
but each is distinct of its own kind, and usually there is 
one substance which takes the lead over all others and 
holds the field. The rest may be thrown down as pre- 
cipitates or they may form combinations by themselves. 

The more stable products, strongly interpenetrating 
and holding each other by opposed transverse motions, 
generally need no forcing process to bring them together, 
and they can combine with ease with casual help. Accept- 
ing the theory of rhythmic primary motion, chemical 
combination becomes as simple and as little mysterious as 
any other copartnership. Since all properties — when esti- 
mated either by their reactions in connection with other 
substances, or by their effects upon the sensations — must 
be objectively explained as special modes of vibration, it 
becomes at once evident that new vibratory results will 
produce the new properties. 

Remembering the incredible vibratory rapidity of light, 
determined by most accurate estimates and measures, 
and the weight of atoms, so small that the ghost of a 
snowflake would outbalance them, yet each with a many- 
sided necessity for a self-balancing equipose, it is not 
difficult to realize how they are enabled to fall into 
mutually adapted positions and conditions for chemical 
union as if by the help of a wondrous magic. 

We can in no wise imagine an active relationship be- 
tween inert space and real energy. Space is only the 
dummy of our thoughts, helping us to relate the actual 
periodic motions. There is nothing in blank space to in- 



SUMMING UP. 231 

terfere with motion in any of its co-operations. So that 
the system's equilibrium of motion is upheld, what differ- 
ence can mere direction make to any vibration ? That 
any vibratory line must be a definitely fixed path is in- 
credible, but that it must move in some adapted path 
— which all correlated equipose demands — is as certain 
as that an atom of continuous motion can persist at all. 
Space is nothing ; its contents everything. 

The necessity for a perpetually moving equilibrium is 
then the guiding principle in chemical and all other unions. 
Motion, whether oppositely directed or moving one way 
upon the same or nearly the same lines, and coming in 
contact with other motions, becomes one working conti- 
nuity with them. The balanced position of the vibratory 
lines of each differenced system, atomic or molecular, 
enables us, for example, to comprehend how water vapor, 
hydrogen and oxygen — the two elements of water vapor 
— can each find its own allotted free paths in a limited 
space already filled with unlike rhythmic systems. 

The requirements of an internal atomic symmetry, 
carried out in all combinations, teach us how each gaseous 
particle can find its way among a crowd of others almost 
as though it were pushed on in a vacuum. The collisions 
and the pressure between atom and atom are between the 
like atoms chiefly, because they are vibrating along lines 
which have the same axis of direction ; and the pressure 
against the containing vessel is the pressure made by the 
interfering like molecules. 

If the pressure was the result of collisions of all sorts, 
in the main, and the atoms were flying in all directions 
in right lines, to my apprehension it would be extremely 
difficult to account for the wonderful fact that each gas 
leaves a practical vacuum for every other gas — as the rule 
if not universally. 

Dulong and Petit gave this form to the law of atomic 
free motion : " The atoms of all simple bodies have pre- 



232 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

cisely the same capacity for heat." Weight increases 
with approximate regularity in the atomic scale by a few 
units of added tension — the free motion, heat, remaining 
a constant. Compare that law with this one : " Equal 
volumes of all substances when in a state of gas and 
under like conditions contain the same number of mole- 
cules." Atoms combine in the molecule with increase of 
tension and distributed motion — the free motion, heat, 
remaining a residual constant ; so they still require only 
a constant space for their free vibrations. The two laws 
are evidently but two aspects of one law : atoms and 
molecules are perhaps evolved by the same method and 
under like conditions ; the same unit of free motion re- 
mains with them each and all — the remainder being redis- 
tributed. 

When the particles move either by diffusing themselves 
into more extended space through help from their sur- 
roundings, or impelled by any equal impulse, the lighter 
ones move precisely enough faster than the heavy ones 
to prove that the same amount of free motion is in action 
and reaction in them all. This free motion then is the 
heat of a low grade ; and equal units of heat require equal 
units of space for their vibrations, and they can exert 
equal pressures upon any opposing obstacle. 

Looking at the phenomena in whatever light we will, so 
long as the co-operations are simple enough to be con- 
fidently followed, there is one unity underlying all aspects 
of every process. In a confined space there is an equal 
distribution of each gas in all parts of the space, some- 
what interfered with by gravity ; but the marked dif- 
fusion seems to accord with the theory of symmetrical 
vibratory paths, different for the different gases, with 
repulsion between like vibrations on their common 
paths ; but it does not well accord with the conception 
of fortuitous collision and right-line translations in all 
directions. 



SUMMING UP. 233 

Kinetic energy is as much a function of a vibratory line 
of motion as of a bodily moving mass ; and the velocity 
of an elongation decides the amount of force which it can 
bring to bear, precisely as much as does the velocity of a 
moving mass. Hitting out from the shoulder is often 
quite as effective as stumbling into a man. 

The invisibility of the immeasurably small gives no 
warrant for the possession of a kind of power not possessed 
by the visible mass. In widely unlike conditions, while 
they must behave very differently, they must also con- 
form to the universal law of correlation in every physical 
change. The seen and the unseen in physics are but the 
poles of one continuous process. 

Infinitesimal combinations do all work in the realm of 
the infinitely small. Man, taking advantage of what is 
already accomplished, continues to turn the combined 
processes into those particular channels which will best 
further his own desires and help him to accomplish his own 
ends. But he introduces no new physical principle, and 
he is not robbed of any old one. He can direct processes 
which before were purely, blindly mechanical ; but he 
has no power to change the working of any mechanism 
except by the introduction of new combinations. And 
Nature's work goes forward in equal quantity — as a river 
flows equally whether in a new or the old channel ; but 
man can help it to turn a mill-wheel instead of running 
to waste along fruitless paving-stones. 

The same amount of energy applied to the same shaft 
can be made either to turn a wheel, to lift a heavy weight 
into the place where it is needed, to set in motion a jagged 
saw which will cut its way through an immense log, or it 
can drill the holes in a needle's eye with points firmer 
and harder than steel. It is the nature of the machinery 
at work, not the nature of the force, which mainly deter- 
mines the character of the work done. The shaft may 
send the energy, motion, onward to a crank which moves 



234 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

a spindle, a saw, a sewing-machine ; to any machine made 
to do a special kind of work, and the motion will be 
transformed into work of that particular kind. 

The nature of the structural reaction must largely 
determine the kind of transformation which will be 
effected in the dynamic factor. This principle holds as 
absolutely in all molecular transformations as it does in 
all mass transformations. If the machinery is worked 
differently, the result is not the same. Then the reaction 
is important. 

Just as the same machine can be made to crush one 
substance to a powder, but to press another together, so 
that from one large mass in the one case we get thou- 
sands of small masses, in the other from a thousand 
small masses we get the one large mass — both by about 
the same process applied under slightly different condi- 
tions, — so attraction and repulsion work together indirectly 
to such an extent that there is often only a hair's breadth 
between them of unlikeness in process, as in some 
electrical phenomena. 

The work which is turned out through the ingenuity 
of man's various machines when run by the same energy 
is quite as unlike in appearance, in uses, and in methods 
of formation or deformation as the unlikeness of any two 
processes or any two products of undirected Nature. 
There is only one matter " stuff," and that is motion. 
Often the sensible motion is only a least part of a relative 
method of working in which each portion hangs upon 
every other, moving this way or that, not of a rigid neces- 
sity, but of a necessity so fluent that the finger of a child, 
a spark from a flint, or a breath of air may reverse ten 
thousand groups of processes in a single instant. The 
only necessity in control of any movement, as we have 
virtually reiterated, is the necessity for a perpetual equi- 
librium through action and reaction. 

At every ordinary quarter vibration, motion and ten- 



SUMMING UP. 235 

sion, elasticity and density, are mutually transformed 
each into the other. But one mode of free motion is 
transformed into other free modes whenever tensions are 
encountered which require a variation in the method of 
the moving energy. Thus electrical action in a current 
is, or may be, changed to heat ; heat and electricity pro- 
mote or are converted into chemical action ; and the 
chemical energy may act either as a composition or as 
a decomposition. 

The comparative nearness or remoteness of a co-opera- 
tion from the respective atomic centres of the various 
factors, and the nature and direction of the associated 
motions, all help to decide the nature of the transforma- 
tions to their least details. They help to decide those 
groupings of many combined motions which make them- 
selves manifest to us as sensible phenomena. 

The visible machines which turn out such diversified 
products are aggregates of motions put together in most 
various ways, but in rigidly mathematical adjustment of 
structure to structure. The machines and their products 
are alike compounded and recompounded motions. The 
millstones which grind, the corn which is ground, the 
bread which is made from it, the teeth which masticate, 
the stomach that digests, and the flesh and bones into 
which it is transmuted, are one and all but the trans- 
formations and the re-transformations of associated 
motions and stresses. 

This will seem less incredible if we remember how 
exceedingly unlike are certain isomeric bodies composed 
of the same identical atoms — substances unlike, simply 
because the primary systems have been very differently 
brought together in their associated transformations. 

The distasteful and malodorous butyric acid of rancid 
butter and the " pleasant fruity-flavored acetic ether " are 
both composed of four atoms of carbon, eight of hydrogen, 
and two of oxygen. 



236 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Because the transmuted vibrations in the one case har- 
moniously accord with our sense vibrations, and in the 
other are enough inharmonious to produce discord and 
probably an unhealthy as it is a disagreeable effect, our 
senses help to testify to the remarkable unlikeness of the 
two completed transformations. 

We reason from the coarse machines which men put 
together in the lump and which transform the utilized 
energy into accord with their own methods, to parallel 
transformations produced in precisely corresponding ways 
at every stage of molecular aggregation. But such infer- 
ence is legitimate. 

Machines do exactly the kind of work which they have 
been adapted to do, each machine not only itself working 
by a process of its own, as determined by its special struc- 
ture, but it transforms associated energies. Thus free 
motion communicated to the wheel adapted to revolve 
and to no mass-motion except that of revolution, what- 
ever mode of energy it may have been previously, will 
now be transformed to the proper motion of the wheel ; it 
will revolve the wheel, and it will revolve with the wheel. 

It has been well said that without matter — structure — 
there can be no transformation of energy. The wheel 
may communicate the same kind of transformed free 
motion to a shaft which can do nothing except to swing 
periodically to and fro ; the free motion must be trans- 
formed now to a to-and-fro long vibration with the shaft. 

With Nature's ten times ten thousand differenced pro- 
cesses each is yet mathematically like every other of its 
own kind. With like terms, the product is accurately 
identical in quality and quantity ; with one or both terms 
dissimilar, the outcome is a precisely definite modifica- 
tion. Any possible devised atom of recurrent motion, at 
once persistent and modifiable through outside co-opera- 
tion, and able fairly to account for existing phenomena of 
all kinds, is equally available as an hypothesis. The illus- 



SUMMING UP. 237 

trative need is only for something which shall lead to an 
intelligent apprehension of correlated motion. 

The translation of a mass, in any point of view, is con- 
densed primary motion in such unity of co-operation that 
to the cognizance of sense it has become one solidarity 
of structure and of movement. In all of the utilities of life 
it may be treated as a unit. In that light the machine is 
one machine ; its method of working may be one method, 
the work which it does one kind of work. All of the 
ordinary operations of life are conducted upon that plane, 
and this must continue to be the case so long as men con- 
tinue to live, to think, and to work upon that entirely 
stable foundation of appearances which is adapted to our 
entire physical constitution when limited to the depart- 
ments of the senses. We move with the moving car and 
see the stationary train in motion. This effect must con- 
tinue. So visible motion and visible concussion, with all 
later recoil, if any is manifest, are apparent facts ; but in 
reality they are as blurred and bare an outline of the 
actual occurrence as possibly can exist and yet represent 
something which did really happen and is recognized. 

The deficiency is not at all in the complex event ; it 
lies wholly in the undiscriminating character of sense per- 
ceptions. Every phase of motion is run into every other 
till they all seem one because their rapidity leaves no 
time to discriminate. It requires much more time to fix 
any definite impression upon our imperfect organs of 
vision than the subtlety of nature's processes can allow. 
Our sight is not false ; it is only imperfect and confused. 
It is like a composite photograph where the light impresses 
of a dozen faces are blended into one ; as we look we are 
ready to affirm that they are all one person and only one. 
So every uninformed man is willing to declare both that 
he sees the real object as it is and that he literally sees 
the real motion as it is. But he would assert with equal 
positiveness that the stationary train was in motion if a 



238 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

wider experience did not assure him of the contrary. It 
is exactly this wider experience with the repeated com- 
parison of one part with another — supplemented by tests 
and experiments of the most various kinds — which enables 
science to rectify many other misapprehensions inevitable 
at first. That mass movement is typical motion, certainly 
belongs exactly to that class. Bacon and Newton reasoned 
as best they could in their times ; but Galileo was right 
in his assertion : " The world does move." No authority 
can permanently put back the dial of progress. 

The real object is undoubtedly made up of billions of 
billions of entangled and condensed co-operative motions. 
The hand which throws the stone is composed of like, to 
us, countless multitudes of grouped and compacted vibra- 
tory motions. The action and reaction between hand 
and stone is the mutual push and counter-push between 
the two sets of vibrations ; and the stone moves on its way 
because, internally tied together as it is, there is less re- 
sistance to that kind of motion and more impulse in that 
direction than any other ; but at the moment of the check 
of collision, the translation is instantaneously, instead of 
progressively, as when moving, reconverted into atomic 
freer motion. Things are not what they seem, not because 
they are less than they seem, but because they are much 
more than they seem. What they are in addition to ap- 
pearances ; what they are when the appearances are 
explained into their least elements, we can never learn 
through sense, but we assuredly can learn in time through 
the intelligent use of reason with a sufficient amount of 
careful investigation in the right directions for obtaining 
information. 

Science cannot work wholly on the plane of the sensa- 
tions and make direct progress. The principles upon 
which it builds do not take their rise in the domain of 
exclusive sensible phenomena. Sight must be corrected 
and discounted by a deeper insight and verified by tests, 



SUMMING UP. 239 

by confirmation in many related sensible and non-sensible 
domains. 

It is futile to interpret nature in the aboriginal light of 
what may be called conceptions in the gross. Primitive 
men were forced to do this. To them the sun rose and 
the sun set ; the green color was in the leaf, and the leaf, 
if thin, was yet a continuous solid. But science progres- 
sively reinterprets very many classes of facts in the light 
of a rectified knowledge in which more and more careful 
experiments and broader rational inferences go hand in 
hand in proving how appearances become misleading, 
and why they never can be relied upon for all the facts 
till verified and extended by crucial tests applied by the 
more discriminating reason. 

On the face of things little harm seemed to result from 
trusting our own eyes, which tell us that the sun moves 
around the earth every day. But if we had clung to 
their testimony alone, astronomy and all kindred sciences 
would still be in the childish stage of make-believe, where 
nothing is expected to be really proved. 

A mechanic can afford to assume that his machines are 
passive; the physicist knows that they are not. Then 
why cling to a definition of work which can be work only 
in a mechanic's sense, which can be no more than the 
apparent result, and which must be more obstructive to 
a future progress than the old astronomical assumption 
of a stable earth to the past ? 

The sensible, never false or really untrue, is never the 
whole truth. At no one point can a rational science 
afford to rely upon its testimony except as discounted 
and interpreted in some wider horizon, or otherwise as dis- 
counted in the neutral atmosphere of an agnostic waiting. 

Effects measure causes, but our immediate causes are 
themselves but methods. The convertibility of one 
energy into another illustrates the fluent yet permanent 
nature of motion, and shows that the transmutation is 



240 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

simply a change of mode. Experiment has discovered how 
much of certain kinds of change equals a given quantity of 
some other kind — as obviously mere change of form, as is the 
conversion of a round ball of wax into a square block of wax. 

Visible motion is the giving way of invisible vibrators 
which go forward together as a massed wave-movement 
— apparently solid in outline ; the motion is probably no 
more solid than the mass which moves. The problem is 
to derive both visible mass and visible motion from invisi- 
ble periodic motions. Apparent solids are so little solid 
that even iron can be beaten into a lesser space ; and the 
simplest translation is the moving of myriads of entangled 
threads of motion. And yet this visible translation is 
still made the typical motion ! No wonder then that 
motion is still popularly considered delusive and 
evanescent, notwithstanding its proved conservation. 

It would be worth while to adopt as an axiom : Every 
sensible phenomenon, in the nature of the case, is and 
can be only partially an actual truth, because our own 
halting senses are all too limited to be able to take in any 
entire reality. 

But intelligence can everywhere and always supplement 
sense-perceptions ; and Nature furnishes abundant tests 
by which we can determine whether or not this has been 
done with entire success. 

The apparent sluggishness of matter, its so-called 
" dead-weight," its seeming inertness, changelessness, 
lifelessness, is the rest of the sleeping top — too rapid to 
appeal to our vision. The apparent flat stillness of color 
is but testimony to the incapacity of physical sight. Our 
senses are massive machines, and whatever work we do 
with them is " lump " work. This is especially true with 
sound. Vocalization, so far as our part in it is concerned, 
is as much a machine process, a tension process, as is 
beating upon an anvil with a sledge hammer. The use 
of the ear in hearing is of the same character. The un- 



SUMMING UP. 241 

combined sounds are not heard. Many of them must 
blend together as one note before we can hear this general 
effect as sound ; and then it comes to our ears as one 
sound — not as many successive waves in an interwoven 
combination of correlated motions. 

Because our ears are fabrics woven out of many inter- 
acting energies, they can only help us to take note of 
other like equally wonderful fabrics which come to them 
in bundles of co-operation, communicating their adapted 
groups of shivers. The mechanism of our eyes is alike 
complex. It is only the associated groups of light-vibra- 
tions coming from every part of a body large enough to 
enable them to concentrate themselves at a visual focus 
so ample as to give us the sensation of seeing, which can 
enable us to see an apparently solid body. The appear- 
ance is, in the nature of the case, accurately misleading, 
if not adequately explained by the enlightened intellect. 
Fortunately it can be explained. 

We see visible masses something as we see far-off trees 
— mere masses of foliage blended by remote distances. 
They are composed of branches, twigs, leaves ; of lithe, 
swaying parts keeping time with the wind ; these parts 
are ribbed, veined, filled in with tissues of complicated 
and symmetrical structures ; but we perceive only appar- 
ently continuous masses that might be shaped from green 
putty so far as any difference in our vision is concerned. 

A pebble held in the hand is even more unfathomable 
to simple vision ; and the most powerful microscope can 
only very partially unravel the closely woven texture of 
the thinnest layer to assist the vision. Then it can only 
show us masses and bundles of like directed motion. A 
cobweb must approximate immeasurably nearer to a cloth 
of cables than to the threads with which Nature weaves 
her coarsest fabrics. Warp and woof must both have 
form and extension of three dimensions, but they all be- 
long to the infinitely small. We are shut into one little 
16 



242 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

niche as remote from that as from the infinitely distant — 
so far as the senses can aid us. Happily we are also a 
part of the Infinite and Absolute. 

Nature certainly works up her complex structures in 
real lines, threads of motion interwoven in complicated 
patterns. The sunlight has visibly demonstrated that 
point. Even her pebbles and her putty, if one could 
follow their exquisite tracery of motion, would be like the 
delicate upper branches of groups of commingling trees 
against the winter sky for openness with interlacing lines 
of beauty. Then if we see only the aggregates, the 
larger masses, and if even these have apparent solidity, 
although many tests convince us that they are not solids, 
we are compelled to conclude that this visible solidity is 
due to minute vibrations, rapid enough to produce on 
our vision the effect of a continuous structure, as we see 
a prolonged band of light from a burning brand waved 
quickly to and fro. Even to the touch the openwork 
structure of matter produces the effect of an apparently 
solid resistance. It is quite in keeping with these and 
similar partially misleading sensations which arise from 
the slowness and dulness of our own sense perceptions, 
and which science has been compelled to rectify by a 
more discriminating class of tests, to infer that all visible 
motion whether direct translation, sensible vibrations, 
like the waving of branches of trees, or any other 
apparent change, are largely effects which arise from the 
use of imperfect implements. 

Our inferences are not in fault until we have learned the 
nature of the organic imperfections and the kind and 
degree of allowance which must be made for each of the 
senses in turn, as well as for the preconceptions which 
we have unwittingly formed, and for the confident but 
too hasty and defective inferences, logical enough from 
their premises, but very far " out of drawing " when tested 
by a larger perspective. 



SUMMING UP. 243 

The telescope is an extended eye in the direction of 
far seeing ; the microscope, in the direction of near seeing. 
When all thinkable devices have been adopted for making 
them both as perfect as possible, one who uses either of 
them must still discount their inaccuracies and supplement 
their inadequacies. Precisely so it is with the use of our 
sense organs. To make them our only reliance is to keep 
very close to the level of the dumb animals. The brain 
proper, with its greater fluidity and its finer complexity, 
is a far better instrument than the special sense organs. 
For one thing, it comprehends them all and can test one 
by the other, and all by their environment ; and as it is 
adapted to larger uses, it is the more pliant as well as 
more directly under the guidance of a wider intelligence. 
But intelligence must guide all real gains. 

We are verging towards another branch of our inquiry. 
All arguments lead everywhere — which is only another 
way of saying that all relations are related ; and as body 
and mind are both relative, they too are correlated, 
though not by the same class of relativity with that which 
allies motion and motion when co-operative. 

Our physical inability to distinguish the details of dis- 
tant visible objects is certainly not greater, perhaps not 
so great, as our inability to distinguish the details in the 
world of the increasingly minute. But the microscope has 
revealed marvels enough to convince one that size is not 
essential either to structure or to power. The atom, our 
physical individual, is inappreciable in size ; and by hy- 
pothesis the mind-side of this mote has no size at all ; yet 
it is, or it may become, a very mighty potency. We only 
ask that each reader who may follow our inquiry further 
will begin by trying to accept for the time the claim that 
the mind-side of the correlated individuality is as literally 
real and as persistent as the matter side ; and that in an 
actual sense the two are but one indivisible unity. 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 

The theory that all matter is motion and that all mo- 
tion is directed force and arises from established active 
correlations must be supplemented by the further claim 
that limited or conditioned minds are also conditioned in 
inseparable correlation with matter. As relative existen- 
ces, the individuals are neither matter alone nor mind 
alone, but are constitutionally related mind-matter units. 
These ultimates are held to be as indivisible, except by 
return into the unrelated absolute, as the physical corre- 
lation is, and for the same reason : Their existence as 
individualized endless processes or changes has arisen 
only in and through their inherent working correlativities. 

Finite minds, and sensibility or sentience that is far be- 
low the rank of mind — which has always included thought 
and intellect among its processes, — undoubtedly arise as 
related manifestations. We know also that these feelings 
are in some Avay very closely related to living organic 
bodies. We assume that there are no relations which are 
not true correlations ; which, when energies are treated of, 
are not true working equivalents. 

The ultimate unit of matter and the ultimate unit of 
mind are not two but one inseparable correlated individ- 
uality. They are two aspects or faces of one persistent 
related being ; and neither aspect can exist or act without 
the inseparable presence and co-operation of its depend- 
ent correlative. But the mind-side begins only as a pos- 
sible or potential mind. Nascent sentience it must have 

244 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 245 

from the beginning of its correlativity ; but its intelligence 
is an evolving process and is, as we know it, attained only 
in conjunction with a very complex organism. The indi- 
vidual, on its physical, its quantitative side, is construc- 
tively complete and finished from the first. Its formal 
changes are innate, its additional modifications are gained 
only through inter-atomic co-operations, and to its changes 
there is no increase. But on its psychical or qualitative 
side, beginning at zero, there seems to be no limit to 
its increase. 

At the risk of some future repetition, it seems best to 
give a condensed general statement of the correlated 
working of these two generically differenced aspects of 
relative being. 

The theory that mind and matter are but the two faces 
or sides of one relative existence is not new, and it seems 
to be steadily gaining adherents. But those who hold to 
this explanation of the complicated and difficult facts, 
generally assume the mind to be evolved, not as the insep- 
arable attendant side of the ultimate atom, but as the 
attendant evolved manifestation of the living organism. 
That theory amounts to the claim that mind is a property 
or outcome of organization ; that it arises with the growth 
of the organism and subsides when the organism is 
destroyed. 

Our theory maintains that a mind can pertain only to 
one and the same rhythmic-motion individual, and that 
any mind gains development just in the proportion in 
which its atomic body (through the organism under pres- 
ent conditions) comes into active co-operations with all 
the rest of closely related nature. Thus the mind's 
knowledge is dependent upon its soma s physical extent 
of active co-partnerships in the manifold co-operative pro- 
cesses of Relative Being. The mind becomes the director, 
as it was from the first the partner, in such processes. But 
whether incarnated or otherwise, is non-essential. 



246 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

Sensibility is ; it develops somehow and somewhere. 
Every one knows that he himself feels, thinks, knows, 
chooses. Whether he is the mind-side of his whole living 
organism, or whether he is the mind-side of one individ- 
ual atom which is in co-operation with and in partial con- 
trol of that organism, one and the same conclusion is 
reached, viz. : that there is a mind-side, a possible sensibility 
which is in some way evolved through physical co-operations. 
The energy immanent in correlated motion is not dead, in- 
sensate ; it has the possibility of waking up into an active 
and growing consciousness of a limited and relative kind. 

To one who holds that soul or mind is essentially sepa- 
rate and distinct from matter, this potential sensibility can 
make but little appeal, and may seem to be of but small 
significance. But, to materialists of every type, and to 
most evolutionists, provisional sensibility, growing into 
nascent consciousness and to self-consciousness, gives all 
that can be needful for the unfolding of the universe of finite 
minds into the fulness of its present attainments. The 
possibility of life and mind must be supposed to arise in 
the atomic constitution. Even though their manifesta- 
tions, their actual development, should be found to arise 
only with and because of organization, and to be proper- 
ties of the organism as a whole, still the potentiality of 
development must date as far back as the ultimates 
themselves. 

Our theory is so far from materialism as to insist that, 
in the old sense of the term materialism, matter itself is 
immaterial. It conforms in no way to the current idea of 
an inert, largely passive substance moved from without. 
On the contrary, it is motion itself ; and all of its motion 
originates within itself because of its innate and energetic 
correlativities. It is matter because it occupies space ; 
because its activities are all motor changes in space ; be- 
cause it pre-empts a definite amount of space, or, more accu- 
rately, because it has or is a measurable fixed extension, 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER, 247 

and all of its possible modifications are of a kind which 
accurately maintain precisely the same amount of exten- 
siveness, of space occupancy, whatever its number of pos- 
sible modal changes. Its space aspects are actual, literal 
realities. 

As matter, therefore, it is purely relative. One half of 
all its motion-phases are exactly what they are and exactly 
as much as they are, because their related motion-phases 
are exactly what they are and exactly as much as they 
are ; and vice versa. Matter is a ready-made construction, 
an automatic mechanism ; but the power, the immanence 
in the structure, is not itself, per se> structure ; is not rela- 
tive. Power remains in abeyance within the structure, so 
far as the structure is directly concerned, except as it en- 
ables the mechanism to do its mechanical work and to act 
continuously in accord with its relative constitution. 

Matter, as defined above, pre-empts its given space to 
the exclusion of all other related extensions. If con- 
ditioned mind is anything differenced from matter, it is 
not change of form or action in space ; its energizing is 
not extensive. Nevertheless, a mind's potential existence 
and development must date as far back as the origin of 
related activity. By hypothesis : Mind is the intensive 
aspect, the sentient, the felt unfolding or developing of 
the ultimate individuality of correlated modes. 

Each mind is a distinct real, an actual something of 
its own kind, as persistent in exercising its functions as 
the matter-side of the same individuality ; it is living 
sensibility evolving within the indestructible rhythm of 
harmonic motion, — both aspects individualized in one de- 
pendent system. Mind is vivified and sustained by the 
same immanent power that upholds motion, being thus 
enabled to unfold its own personal experience — always 
limited, but forever growing, enlarging, intensifying, and 
discriminating — through co-operations manifold and of 
unlimited duration. 



248 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

So far from mind being a property of matter, matter 
is but the vantage-ground, the place, the ever-balanced 
sustainer, the helpful servitor of mind ; the available 
mediator between the mind and its universe — whether of 
other minds or of other matter. It is the sole worker in 
the tangible world of space. 

Of inherent necessity, to matter there can be no real 
evolution. Power does not increase in quantity with time. 
It simply is and remains. It can only increase its work- 
ing capacity by alliance with other power. By compound- 
ing itself into tensions, matter attains to better and 
broader uses, not in its own interest, but in that of its 
allied sensibility. By surplus dynamic modes, by ex- 
tended co-operations, it can do the mind's behests at the 
ends of the earth as a more than winged Mercury though 
it may never move far from its own place. 

Each mind and its form, its soma, are together condi- 
tioned — a mind-matter individual, or a motion-feeling 
unity. The rhythmic atom is alive with the high possi- 
bilities of ever-growing sensibility and actual knowledge. 
But what conceivable growth can be attained by the 
distinctly material side of this conditioned being ? 

If the theory is sustained by the facts, the individual 
atoms in clods and stones may have nascent feeling — must 
have the possibility of individual sensibility. The first 
glimmer of feeling is the dawning mind. With every 
motion arises the response of correlated nascent or con- 
scious emotion. Mind and matter are held to be two in 
kind, one in correlativities of change : the changes in 
the matter-realm, quantitative and measurable as quanti- 
ties ; the changes in the mind-realm qualitative and, 
except as to duration, not directly measurable at all. 
Feeling — on the whole the best term for including all 
mental changes — must be felt by one's self, and can be only 
indicated to others by the use of material symbols, visual 
or vocal. It can then be apprehended only by those 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 249 

who previously have themselves had partially similar 
experiences. Knowledge is but intelligent feeling. 

By measuring or estimating in any way the motion- 
phases in which and with which feelings arise, we learn 
indirectly that, other things equal, degrees of feeling rise 
and fall with increase and decrease of correlated motions ; 
that with modification of motions come reciprocal modifi- 
cations of feeling — the one side of the same change being 
in space, the other in consciousness, and both in a com- 
mon time. They arise together, like color and form, — 
like them inseparable aspects of one unity. 

But form and color are not identical m. kind ; they must 
be discriminated, and each realized as a differentiated 
modality of its own kind. Mind and matter are radically 
unlike in every feature ; acting and manifesting them- 
selves in different worlds, and growingly differentiated in 
every process. Not to fully discriminate between them, 
not to assign to each its own province and its own 
efficiency, is to fail grievously in analytic perception and 
must lead to endless confusion. 

It is often assumed that feeling is one kind of motion ; 
that there is feeling of position and of extension and of 
their changes. This is not the time for full discussion of 
that or any other feature of this wonderfully complex 
subject. We can only claim here that these alleged and 
admitted facts can be shown to have both real extensive 
and also real intensive aspects, and that the two are as un- 
like in present kind, in the subsequent effects which each 
can produce, and in general evolutionary outcome, as ap- 
parently they could have been made through any con- 
ceivable ingenuity of creative scheme. The feeling of 
extension and extension are two things. 

Time we know is a non-entity except as the ideal measure 
of actual changes, the ideal domain in which these changes 
arise. Space is a nothing except the ideal extension in 
which actual extensive changes play their wonderful part 



250 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

in the evolution of conditioned minds. Consciousness — 
as a domain — is nothing but the inclusive, ideal realm in 
which actual relative feeling is evolved. In the individual 
consciousness, is to be in the ideal world that symbolizes 
the reality of living and personal feeling. 

No motion can do more than react when acted upon ; 
its rate, its direction, its form of activity, is co-operative 
and determined, not by itself, but by its correlatives. 
Every pronounced feeling might, and one gleam of desire 
often does, initiate modes of motion which but for the im- 
pelling feeling could never have taken that form in that 
time. Feeling, working with the order of nature and in 
perfect accord with its laws, can do much more than 
respond — like motion — in direct mechanical reaction ; it 
can change the entire order of events ; and it can so modify 
events themselves that the outcome is often extremely 
different from what it would have been except for the 
intervention and the direction of the feeling. 

Feeling is the active, quick sensibility of motion, but 
motion is the doing side, the mighty direct and the 
mightier indirect agent of feeling ; the true executive in 
the accomplishment of feeling's behests. A mind, acting 
by means of its atomic body, its soma (we use the Greek 
name to distinguish it from the organic larger body, the 
sensible organism), is able to so modify many motions in 
related groups that it can, and it habitually does, change 
the entire previous motion-programme of any part of 
its organism and its more immediate surroundings, and it 
even controls and directs the movements of very far- 
distant bodies. How better shall one explain the nature 
of the phenomena by which an arm moves in response 
to a desire? Failing the desire, the volition enjoining 
adapted motion — first in its own soma, which then so 
modifies the physical action of its close neighbors that 
they in turn carry the same motive impulse outward — 
there would have been no lifting or extending of the 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 25 I 

arm ! If an axe is grasped and wielded and the wood 
chopped by its help, feeling initiated, sustained, and con- 
strained the entire process ; or if it be a half-mile-long 
train of cars filled with its precious living men, all flying 
together through space, propelled by steam, yet feeling, 
from first to last, is the sole rational cause of the entire 
combined movement. The executive cause, the material 
cause from first to last, has been modified and co-opera- 
tive motion ! 

Feeling is the true and only initiator ; the sole origina- 
tor of all real progress. This is its distinctive province — 
to engineer its own growth through the attainment of its 
desired ends, and to aid in promoting the evolution of all 
living beings akin to itself. All gain is mental. 

Motion is ever stationary in quantity and never station- 
ary in modes ; but its modes are only changes in the 
forms of extensive energizing. 

Feeling increases by an accumulation of experience, 
which, under adapted conditions, it may recall and revive, 
relating its sentient past into one unity of active con- 
sciousness ; and its modes are additions to an endless 
serial of intensive, indestructible, real values. 

Motion can make no gain, because, from the conditions 
under which it works, it must simply repeat itself, its 
possible modifications pertaining only to its way of doing, 
not to the doing itself. 

Feeling is pure gain because it is living experience ; its 
inmost nature is cumulative, acquisitive, whether of good or 
evil. It also is an endless ongoing, but in the direction of 
a widening vivid life, which, if properly engineered, may 
become of increasing intensest interest and of inexpres- 
sible satisfaction. It may also become real knowledge. 

Now to call the respective outcome upon these two 
sides of relative being by one name, or to try to make 
either a property of the other, is clearly preposterous. 
They are inseparable, but their functions are more unlike 



252 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

than noon and midnight. They are both created — that is, 
constituted or conditioned. The immanent energy which 
sustains both may be immaterial and intelligent ; but 
motion, as motion, has no intelligence, and no function 
except that of reaction to other motion or emotion ; it is 
material — the one and only something which we know as 
matter. But mind is non-material, increasing personal 
experience — experience acquired by itself, for itself, under 
very definitely established conditions to which it must 
rigidly conform or fail to find anything but utter blank- 
ness. Mind is the total of personal sentience, the sum of 
acquired experience when we consider it only in its pri- 
mary relativity ; but it is the personal experience of one 
persisting if complex individuality. It increases because 
it is forever extending the range of its co-operations — of 
its sensations, its perceptions, its thoughts, its purposes — 
always by the help of co-working matter, motion. 

A mind grows primarily by the executive aid of its own 
soma ; secondarily, by availing itself of the helpful services 
of its living organism, and of larger and larger portions 
of the environment, organic and inorganic. Its indirect 
copartnerships become vastly more extensive and gainful 
than those which are comparatively direct. Two minds 
communicate, but so far as yet appears only through the 
intervention of matter. One embodies his thought in 
symbols called vocal speech — a physical process which 
travels on to the other who hears and retranslates into 
feeling, into thought. Or one writes and the other reads 
— both using physical symbols of another kind. Motion 
always and everywhere apparently is the medium between 
feeling communicated from one to another. 

One mind quickens another through the intervention 
of motion, the inseparable accompaniment of feeling, as 
feeling is the inseparable accompaniment of motion. 
Hands are clasped in loving pressure ; but it is not the 
clinging tensions which feel ; they but respond to the 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 2$3 

sensibility. Whoever can best avail himself of the activity 
of the manifold powers of both physical and psychical 
nature can best attain for himself and stimulate in others 
the most ennobling mental evolution. All values being 
purely qualitative, valuable because they can be allied to 
feeling, thousands sharing in this class of modifications, 
only multiply and increase the enjoyment of each and of 
all. Though every mind has its own mental experience, 
which can no more be literally transmitted to any other 
than its own proper motion can be given to another, yet 
through manifold co-operations, modes of activity, physical 
and psychical, are communicated from one to another with 
equal readiness. 

Co-operation is the sole and only method of promoting 
changes of any kind. Co-operation itself is a method of 
indifference except as it is adapted to secure a desired 
sentient end. Very unlike modes may often produce 
nearly or quite the same felt outcome, while nearly the 
same methods, with some but (physically) slight dissimi- 
larity, may result in widely different phenomena mentally 
interpreted. Organization has been the prevailing type 
of working copartnerships most intimately known to us ; 
but the vast amounts of active reciprocity between us and 
inorganic nature are fairly conclusive evidence that there 
may be many other and doubtless wider and higher co- 
partnerships which will become even more favorable to 
the evolution of personal mind. The end is the same 
whatever the multiplicity of means. 

Mind emerges as the alive and sentient side of the 
conditioned individual. In our experience we know that 
sensation arises most vividly whenever there is some 
decided change in the kind of outside stimulation — pre- 
sumably producing corresponding change in the responsive 
soma and hence in its sensibility — in its attendant psyche. 
We assume that feeling and motion are the inseparable 
aspects of one and the same ultimate of endless process. 



254 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

If the system vibrated in a permanent isolation, having 
but one endlessly repeated cycle of changes, there could 
be no growing response in feeling, no consequent growth 
of mind. But through inter-atomic co-operation the pri- 
mary cycle of motions becomes most variously and mar- 
vellously modified, and with every new mode of motion 
comes the corresponding new mode of feeling. We have 
already indicated several typical methods in which units, 
becoming compounded through some of their vibrators, 
may be profoundly modified by the coaction of their allies. 

It is not too much to suppose that during the countless 
ages since the existing constitution of the universe has 
continued almost every atom must have undergone so 
many successive associations and dissociations — having in 
consequence at one time an abnormal increase of tension, 
at another of free motions — that its sensibility, however 
vague and nascent it may always have remained, must 
yet have had some real and felt increase of inchoate ex- 
perience. The most favored among them may have come 
instinctively to appreciate that certain co-operative modes 
are inhibitive or tension-forming, and others assistive or 
motion-utilizing. Under favorable impelling conditions, 
associated atoms may practically act in accord with these 
generic suggestions ; so far stimulated by nascent feeling 
as to form that class of unions which tend towards the 
increase of free motion, hence of feeling. 

This briefly explains the theory of organization. An 
instinctive, social impulse seems to act first as stimulus 
to organization, and secondly, to itself increase as the 
result arising from and because of organization. In the 
inorganic world motion is simply mechanical response ap- 
parently wholly undirected by sensibility ; though sensi- 
bility may be an accompaniment having little or no 
modifying influence upon the physical phenomena. But 
in the organic world, feeling is both cause and effect, 
consciously or unconsciously directing and modifying 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 255 

every organic process ; entering fully into the relativity 
of action and reaction — directly with its own soma and 
indirectly with the whole organism and the co-operative 
world outside. 

Yet the feeling is neither physical cause nor physical 
effect. Nor does it enter into the chain of material events. 
Every link in that chain is purely material and must so 
remain of constitutional necessity. No sentient guidance 
or interference can change that structural correla- 
tivity which underlies and constrains the whole material 
universe, limiting it to time and space changes. 

But the most primary feeling which serves as a stimulus 
to organization must be akin to that which upon a higher 
plane we denominate purpose, volition, or rational cause. 
Just as the inventor and maker of a machine is rational 
cause of the existence of that machine, while yet every 
part of it is wholly material, and exists physically because 
the material substances which entered into its composition 
previously existed, so is it in a living organism. Two 
generically unlike kinds of causes co-operate together 
throughout in all organic upbuilding. 

I. Without prior non-organized matter, no organized 
matter! 2. Without personal feeling, no organized matter ! 
One proposition is exactly as true as the other. Each ex- 
presses a universal law of its own kind, to which no ex- 
ception seems to be possible. At any rate we hold that 
no exception to either law is really thinkable, however 
eminent the authorities who have been able to believe 
otherwise. It is the same as saying: No brass and steel 
out of which the mainspring and the little wheels are 
made, no watch ! No maker of the watch, no watch ! 
Both causes must work together ; yet the two are more 
differenced as causes than words can be made to express. 
Noon and midnight, east and west, north-pole and south- 
pole, are only contrasts, opposites. Material cause and 
sentient cause may indeed be regarded as the contrasted 



256 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

poles of relative being ; but their differentiation is infinitely- 
greater than can be indicated by any physical opposite- 
ness. They are differentiated in their distinctive methods 
both of being and of doing, and in the outcome which 
each as cause can effect either for itself or for the other. 

It is argued that the energy of a blow, after its effect 
on the physical tissue, is conveyed by the nerves to their 
sensation-centres, where literally it is converted into feel- 
ing, as really as one mode of motion may be exchanged 
for other modes, or as a circle can be bent into a triangle 
or a square. In this view, feelings are modes of motion, 
of a peculiar kind certainly, but motions in such a sense 
that the motion can merge into a feeling and the feeling 
into a motion. Thus miscellaneous external causes, acting 
upon the organism, change into feeling; and feelings 
manifested by some bodily action are really transformed 
into definite and visible changes in the outside world. 
When anger strikes a blow, knocking over indifferently a 
man or a footstool, the anger is literally converted into 
the action of the muscles of the arm, then into the fall of 
the body which received the blow. 

In these examples there is in the first one continuity of 
process between the blow and the feeling of pain, and in 
the other between the anger and the fall ; a clear case is 
really made out that the one is cause and the other is 
effect in both examples. But when we argue from such 
relations in processes either that feeling becomes motion, 
or that motion becomes feeling, we jump to conclusion 
over what must prove to be a literally impassable gulf. 
The thinking which underlies it is "pseud" thinking, no 
better than trying to think an angle into a line, or a 
direction into a motion, or a form into a color. 

As a motion and the direction which it takes can never 
be separated, yet are not one and the same, so one mode 
of motion may be transformed by another acting upon 
it as cause and its direction be changed thereby. The 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 2$? 

causal motion is cause of the change of direction as really 
as it is cause of the changed motion ; yet the motion is 
not, and in the nature of things, cannot be changed into 
a direction. It can only be itself changed in direction 
through co-operation. 

In a precisely analogous way external cause in the guise 
of a mode of motion may be transmitted to the soma, and 
induce the same mode in the soma, or some modification 
of the same ; the sensibility must then change in con- 
formity with the somatic changes. The external cause 
would be the indirect partial cause of the resulting modi- 
fication in feeling ; but the cause would no more become 
this part of the effect, the motion would no more become 
feeling in the conscious mind, than it would or could 
become direction in the soma, or anywhere else. 

If one bends a wire triangle with equal sides into a new 
triangular form having one long side and two short ones, 
the act is a cause of the change of every angle in the 
triangle ; but has the cause — one's self, or the energy which 
one brings to bear upon the wire in changing the form of 
it — been literally converted into the angles of the triangle ? 

Or has even the energy used been converted either into 
the wire or into the new form which the wire is made to 
assume? It is a vital mistake to suppose, as seems to be 
habitually done, especially where motion or any other 
kind of change is concerned, that a cause actually becomes 
its effect ; that the energy in any active cause is literally 
carried forward and put into the effect. Every physicist 
knows that this is not the case ; that the language which 
seems to assert that it is, is of the same kind as that 
which says the sun rises and sets, and revolves about the 
earth ; but, unhappily, while not even a child blunders in 
regard to the sun, some of the wisest men become griev- 
ously confused about the assumed literal conversion of 
cause into effect — especially when the cause under con- 
sideration is a motion, and the effect a feeling. Whatever 



258 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

body receives one mode of energy, simultaneously reacts 
with another and equal mode ; it has not exchanged force, 
it has, by co-operation, only changed its modes. 

In general an organism receives more dynamic activities 
— giving equivalent static modes in exchange — than any 
other body. Hence it perpetually gains in availability; 
in the power practically to utilize what it receives, and to 
dispose of whatever can no longer be of active service to 
itself. But there can be positively no exchange of power, 
no transfer of anything, except ways of doing. Anger 
cannot put itself into the body which it strikes, and it is 
equally absurd to suppose that the striking body or any- 
thing else can change a motion into anger, or into any 
other feeling. But by causing some change of motion in 
the soma, the sensibility of the soma responds correla- 
tively; and — as dynamic energy is mainly the type re- 
ceived — the awakened activity of feeling is proportionately 
vivid and intense. 

It has not been shown that whether consciousness does 
or does not attend any organic process makes the slightest 
difference in the amount of physical energy involved. 
When the mind is modified in feeling by physical causes, 
the immediate modifier or cause is the soma and its 
changes, and the more remote causes are organic and 
extra-organic. 

Many organic processes apparently do not involve the 
soma to any appreciable extent. If feeling is occupied 
elsewhere or is under the influence of an anaesthetic many 
bodily functions go forward with no interruption. All 
experiment goes to show that any feeling evolved by out- 
side action upon the organism is over and above all 
physical effects, and is in no sense an amount subtracted 
from these — which are always precisely the equivalent of 
their causes. 

In this case the causes and effects are like in kind; 
they are correlated terms of the same order and duly 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 259 

balance each other as equivalent energies at all stages of 
their co-operation, as physical forces are constrained to 
do under all possible conditions. The mental effects are 
not uncaused, but they belong to a wholly different 
category. They are in correlation with the outside causa- 
tion, but the term correlation here denotes a wholly 
different kind of mutual conditioning. If there were any 
other current word to express the type of co-operation 
between feeling and motion, such a word would tend both 
to accuracy of thought and to convenience of expression. 
In the absence of any verbal distinction it is only possible 
to emphasize the fundamental difference between the two 
kinds of active and causative correlation. 

Physical correlation implies active physical equality or 
quantitative equivalence between the correlative terms. 

Physical and psychical correlation expresses the equally 
active co-operation between related terms ; but one of 
the terms being quantitative and the other qualitative, 
though all must regard them as true equivalents, all ex- 
tensive and measurable equality is impossible. They are 
correlated in a common time and a common process. 
But while the co-operative motions belong to the same 
aspects of that process, the motion and the feeling belong 
to different aspects of one and the same process. By 
hypothesis, every correlated change has these two generi- 
cally differentiated aspects, and all known changes are 
correlative. 

But this last type of correlativity is quite as frequent as 
the other, as already indicated by such examples as related 
terms of the unlike functions of mathematical units and 
of everything else real or ideal which has inseparable 
properties that vary together and yet are non-convertible 
because of their generic dissimilarities. Thus the man 
who builds a machine works in correlation with his grow- 
ing mechanism. His mind is the guiding, the utilizing 
power which controls the entire structure ; yet no part of 



260 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

his real personality is put into the machine in the sense 
that he is something less after the machine is finished 
than he was when he began the work. His thought is 
expressed or represented symbolically in the new group- 
ing of physical correlations ; but his thought has not 
been converted into matter, nor into any form of matter, 
nor can it be by any conceivable possibility. 

So long as any expounder of science admits, like 
Tyndall and many others, that there is found no con- 
sistently thought relationship between mind and matter, 
on that point, as a teacher of others as well as in the 
integrity of his own conscience, he is bound to be a true 
agnostic. The bond which unites actual correlates is 
undoubtedly a thinkable bond if we regard mind and 
matter as the two aspects or faces of one unity. They 
are correlates because they are conditioned together in a 
mutual dependence which compels them to vary together, 
each an index of the other. Their co-operation is as con- 
stitutional and necessary as that the inside and outside of 
anything which has thickness, in the nature of the case, 
must arise and persist together. 

It needs only that the power which informs motion 
be living power capable of intelligence, for that potential 
intelligence to become developed through co-operation, 
which is ever broadening in its scope. The motion is a 
mechanical variation, but the power which moves, if it 
has possible sensibility, must gain a new experience with 
every new and wider range of modifications ; hence with 
the compounding and recompounding of the primary 
rhythm under conditions which increase its continuous 
dynamic action, as organization may do for the soma of 
conscious mind, the evolution of such mind is inevitable. 

It becomes a question of sensibility or no sensibility, 
life or no life, intelligence or non-intelligence, as the 
potential heritage of the primary atom of conditioned 
individuality. If the force manifested in motion is alive, 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 26 1 

in the sense that it may learn to feel, because it may 
increase in complexity of motion through ever enlarging 
copartnerships, and feeling is the sentient side of motion, 
and must arise with motion, unfolding just in proportion 
to the increasing motion modifications, the entire prob- 
lem is simplified. 

A correlated individual mind, as individual, must begin 
at the zero of life and feeling. When conditioned, it 
starts, not a sheet of blank paper as certain older theories 
imaged it, but it starts from the vantage-ground of a 
sentient possibility, which will amount to much or little 
according to the conditions in which it may be succes- 
sively developed. It feels and knows whatever and only 
whatever comes to it from the widening co-operations of 
its physical side — the executive but blind and mechani- 
cal side of its complex being. But when it has gained 
knowledge and effective position in a highly organized 
body, then it may take the lead and determine for itself 
the character of the co-operatives which it thinks will best 
serve its highest interests. 

The changes in space and in consciousness are one 
identical group of modifications, yet the feeling must be 
discriminated from the moving, as color from form, as 
any correlates which are not mutually convertible 
because alien in nature. Death and life might suggest 
equal unlikeness. But by the theory there is no death. 
Matter cannot be called dead, but neither is it alive. 
Mind lives, but its growing feeling is more than life. 
Mind is higher than life, because it is life unfolded into 
rational experience. 

Is it said, " an organism lives and dies " ? Yes, in a 
qualified sense ; that is, it sustains organic processes, but 
if our theory is true it has no actual life and it undergoes 
no real death. Life, feeling, mind, one and all express 
actual personality of a kind which is exclusive of every- 
thing else — even of Absolute Being itself. So a triangle 



262 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

excludes everything which is not a triangle, a circle every- 
thing which is not a circle. In the constitution of all of 
these, each one is exclusively individual. 

Granted that life and potential mind is the attribute of 
each correlated atom and as persistingly a part of its 
inherent nature and constitution as its material side, we 
need nothing more in order to interpret the existing 
worlds of mind and matter. But if the capacity for an 
evolving sensibility is not to be posited in the primary 
unit of correlated being, where then ? No one has suc- 
cessfully thought out a method for evolving life from the 
not alive. The where has been assigned to the living 
organism. But why living? In what sense living? The 
transformation of the non-living into life, since it cannot 
be realized in thought, ought never to have been assumed. 
To this part of the discussion we must return later. 

The ultimate atom of correlated motion perhaps might 
exist and act without awakening any related sentience. 
Also there may exist minds living in a series of corre- 
lated feelings which have no tendency to co-operate with 
or to modify motion. But all the minds which we know 
are intimately associated with their bodies, and all living 
bodies in some way develop a living succession of sensa- 
tions. We must therefore study mind in connection with 
its organism and its general environment. 

Provided beings of a purely physical or those of a purely 
psychical type do exist, each type complete in itself, then 
at present we cannot realize in thought any method or 
scheme through which either class could be enabled to act 
upon the other. The how of such co-operations would 
seem to be unthinkable. One should be ready to say 
with Prof. Tyndall : " Granted that a definite thought 
and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simulta- 
neously, we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor 
apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would ena- 
ble us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to 






CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 263 

the other. They appear together ; but we do not know 
why. Were our minds and senses so expanded, 
strengthened, and illuminated as to enable us to see and 
feel the very molecules of the brain ; were we capable of 
following all their motions, all their groupings, all their 
electric discharges, if such there be ; and were we inti- 
mately acquainted with the corresponding states of 
thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the 
solution of the problem, ' How are these physical pro- 
cesses connected with the facts of consciousness ? ' The 
chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still 
be intellectually impassable." 1 

Units of being all of whose modes of changing are 
sensations and thoughts, and other beings all of whose 
modes of changing are varied motion, how are they to 
affiliate ? The one pure soul, the other pure body ! 
What conceivable bond can help them to become co- 
operative ? 

But this theory of finite existence is the prevailing one. 
In some utterly unexplainable way, having become yoke- 
fellows, when unharnessed by death, of course they can be 
again separated and the conscious soul may retain its per- 
sonality ; the matter and the mind going apart may both 
continue in being forever. The hypothesis is sufficiently 
self-consistent. 

But it is incredible that processes in continuous action, 
so nearly related to our wellbeing, to mental insight and 
its most intimate cognitive powers, should yet be so 
wholly outside of all recognition. A mind which can 
know so many other things ought to have some power of 
divining the nature of the relations which ally it to the 
nervous system of its helpful organism. Since it 
receives no hint of our possessing perceptive and rea- 
soning powers adapted to fathom the nature of the 

1 Scientific Materialism, Prof. Tyndall. 



264 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

consociation between a mind and its body — if they are 
regarded as two distinct entities, — this fact is a strong pre- 
sumption that there is some blunder in the way of stating 
the problem which in this form is so utterly insoluble. 
There is manifold evidence that whatever is, is knowable 
as it is ; and that to any intelligence which can gain the 
right attitude for perceiving it and testing it in its mul- 
titudes of relationships, it is knowable for exactly what 
it is. 

The theory that correlation is the method through 
which all relative entities are constituted, can intelligently 
correlate in thought one indivisible being, a mind-matter 
unity, which, according to clearly outlined methods, may 
co-operate with an adapted organism, and through its in- 
tervention with the wider outside world. This ultimate, 
relation-constituted unit, mind on its sentient or feel- 
ing side, but matter on the doing or moving side, is an 
entirely thinkable personality, and its modes of co-opera- 
tion can be made to appear not only conceivable but we 
think probable, reasonable — even by cumulative evi- 
dence demonstrable. 

The greatest difficulty arises from the indefiniteness of 
language. A word used in several senses may convey an 
erroneous idea ; but when the thought itself has taken a 
new meaning which can be put into the symbol represent- 
ing it only by means of the context and its imperfectly 
suggested explanations, the thought may be differently 
apprehended by different readers. 

The theory that mind is the sentient side, phase, aspect, 
or manifestation of matter, has been made familiar to 
philosophy by Prof. Bain and others, but all of these, if 
I understand them aright, hold that the psychical side is 
nothing more than one class of the legitimate properties 
of matter — although a marked class distinguished by its 
kind from the physical properties which arise from time 
to time as the result of special material aggregations. The 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 265 

sentience is called into action in the living organism, a 
complex of feeling whose physical analogue is motion of 
any organ as a whole, or of the entire organism as a whole — 
that is, its analogue is molar motion ; the feeling is the mind- 
side of the whole brain, of the whole body. To me, feeling 
can be the mind-side of only one physical atom in the 
organism. Self-consciousness can be the mind-side of only 
one ultimate correlated individual, who, as some philoso- 
phers have supposed, may take a chief and controlling part 
in an advanced organism. Its physical other side is made 
up of the one atom's endlessly varied atomic modes of 
motion. These modes, co-operation within the organism 
calls into special, new manifestations. A mind-complex, 
common to a multitude of co-operative physical atoms, is, 
if possible, more unthinkable than the older theory of the 
one soul and the same multitude of ever coming and 
going groups of particles which keep up the normal con- 
dition of a living organism. There is no difficulty if each 
of these may have separate nascent feeling of its own. 

Mind is no more a property of matter than matter is a 
property of mind. Feeling is dependent upon motion no 
more and no less than motion is dependent upon feeling. 
They arise together through the correlations which differ- 
entiate them from the homogeneous absolute and from 
each other ; and being but the two sides of one method 
of change, they are always distinct but never separate. 

It may seem needless to insist that the mind-matter 
ultimate individuality cannot have been originated as to 
its entity or essential existence. This was and is, in and 
of the absolute. Its individuality and its relativity alike 
pertain to its processes alone. This constructive unit in 
its motion phases is an endless but modifiable rhythm of 
extensive energizing ; in its emotion phases the same iden- 
tical rhythm is a flow of feeling. The true unity is not 
an originated something; it is a somehow through which 
and because of which the new individual somehow 



266 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

emerges. Correlated terms which mutually limit, direct, 
compel; which literally necessitate each other in an endless 
onflow, must run backward to the moment when the 
efficient correlativity became differentiated from the non- 
relative, and when time itself began to be differentiated 
from endlessly present duration. Correlations may be at 
any time created. 

These distinctions call attention to the fact that no 
process can be known, can be reasonably explained to 
minds which derive all their inferences and conclusions 
from existing data, until it can be thought by representing 
its supposed progressive changes in mental sequence ; or 
by recognizing the logical necessity of its relations, if we 
are dealing with abstract propositions. To gain even par- 
tial knowledge of the phenomenal or process world, or of 
any part of it, we must mentally realize the possible how 
of its sequences. Knowledge is thought ; thinking is the 
mind's relationing ; and unless we can suppose ourselves 
to reproduce in thought the actual objective realities 
about which we reason, as philosophic Realists we can have 
no right to claim that we can make an authoritative state- 
ment concerning anything which has relations ; concerning 
anything whose energies and modes arise in sequence. 

We hold ourselves strictly amenable to this law. In 
attempting to indicate the nature and relations of mind, 
matter, and their associated processes, the test of actual 
thinkableness is fairly accepted. Beyond that, the ade- 
quacy of the theory to interpret the phenomena with 
which it deals must be judged upon quite other grounds. 

Mind and matter, two aspects of one and the same 
thing associated under constitutional conditions which 
necessitate both phases of the one relation, like inside and 
outside, or the color of an object as distinguished from 
its form or its size, — the correlated mind and its atomic 
body, are as inseparable as the right angles in a cube are 
inseparable from the sides and from the cube as a whole, 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER, 267 

and for precisely the same reason ; they are unlike but 
dependent terms of the same unity. 

Nor are the personal mind and its individual body to be 
regarded in the light of merely differentiated parts of the 
same atom ; they are the different kinds of relativities 
which together constitute one and the same dependent 
whole. The sentience, the sensibility, the intensiveness 
literally infuses every part of the extensiveness; and the 
modes of the personal feeling change when the atomic 
modes of motion are modified, and vice versa. This only 
means that the power brought into action in related atomic 
motion is living power. It feels and recognizes its own 
modifications ; and when as living power it initiates its 
own sentient modes, its modes of external or extensive 
change in turn must conform themselves to the intensive 
modification. 

It is certainly no more difficult to think of power as 
living, feeling, knowing, choosing, than to think of the 
same power as dead and purely mechanical in all of its 
possible reactions. So far as it has become a mechanism 
through its correlated extensive activities, it must obey 
the laws of a machine. This it does in all of its motion- 
changes ; its emotions are not only over and above 
their correlated motions, but they may be thought of as 
in a very distinct sense taking the initiative, modifying 
the action of the atomic mechanism, and through that the 
associated action of the larger mechanism — the brain and 
its whole nervous system, through that the action of the 
muscles ; through the muscles it may be thought of as in- 
directly acting upon and modifying the external world. 

In the possible how of this widening circle of material 
processes there is no difficulty in forming an entirely clear 
mental conception ; for the whole co-operative motion- 
system is purely a machine working in accordance with 
the laws of a machine. But all modifications must arise 
in correlated groups. 



268 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

At the mainspring of such a mechanism is the evolved 
related consciousness. This, by deciding its own conscious 
modes, decides the modification of the related atomic 
motions ; these mechanically decide those of the nervous 
system ; these in turn set the muscles in action, and they 
act on the outer world. We are not able to think the two 
aspects — a feeling and a motion — in co-operation as two 
things ; we are able to think that feeling is in every mo- 
tion, that a special kind of feeling is in and with every 
rate and mode of motion. Conversely if the feeling is 
first appealed to by its appropriate stimulus, with the rise 
of the feeling the accompanying motion must undergo 
corresponding modification. We can think of motion and 
feeling as both properties of one energy, both as its pri- 
mary kinds of correlated activity. 

We can never hope to construct in thought any possible 
process by which feeling can be interpreted to arise from 
or to become a property of motion, of matter; nor yet 
any process by which motion, matter, can be interpreted 
to arise from or to become a property of the personal 
mind. 

But we can construct in thought possible processes in 
which motion and feeling must continuously emerge to- 
gether as the two aspects, two faces of one unity of serial 
changes. It is these correlated changes which together 
constitute an ultimate motion-feeling unit. The relative 
being arises within the non-relative, because its internal 
correlations necessitate it to become a distinct co-operative- 
ness. Its nature and its functions are assured to it through 
the same principle of correlativity that necessitates a cube 
to become a cube, because its sides are equal, its opposite 
sides are parallel, and all its angles are right angles. With 
its related terms differently correlated, the conditioned 
figure must become a triangle, a lozenge, a circle, a cone. 
The character of the correlations must determine the 
nature of the constructed unity. 



CORRELATED MIND AND MATTER. 269 

A being constituted through correlations established 
between active, variously directed extensive energies, 
must be a rhythm of continuous modifications in form. 
If these correlated energies are living substance, the life 
must be a continuous onflow of modifications of lively 
feeling. Its personal life is the resultant of its active cor- 
relativities. As the extensive outcome is ever new modi- 
fications of motion, so the intensive outcome is ever new 
modifications of feeling. The one kind is never, can 
never be, transformed into the other ; but they run on 
together in relations more intimate than those of color 
and form in the same object. Both arise through the 
correlation of functions. The same eternal vitality is 
immanent in each alike ; they have the same onflow in 
time. But on the motion face of the same change, every 
section or phase of it must be estimated in terms of space ; 
on the emotion side, in terms of consciousness. 

The motion side can be measured only by other units 
of the actually extended, but the emotion side can never 
be directly measured by such units. The motion side 
must always be estimated in terms of quantity ; the emo- 
tion side, always in terms of quality. 

In a loose way we speak of kinds and qualities of matter 
and its properties ; but in the last analysis all of these, 
considered objectively, can be reduced to motions which 
in their inmost nature are purely spatial or extensive. In 
a loose way we speak of quantities, amounts, degrees of 
sensation, emotion, thought, purpose ; but in the last 
analysis all of these, considered subjectively, are purely 
qualities of feelings. What we call more feeling is an in- 
tenser kind of feeling. A new quality of a keener vigor 
has entered into it, and made it different in kind. 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 

CAN the rhythmic atom, constituted with life and poten- 
tial sensibility, be made in thought fairly to originate and 
interpret the complicated facts of conscious experience in 
its association with organic growth and decay? Or does 
organic process, as the origin of life and mind, more 
rationally explain the phenomena of a living sensibility ? 

The two theories, which maintain that mind is one 
aspect of matter, are yet most remote in their assump- 
tions, and still more so in their final conclusions. Mind, 
as one aspect of an organism, lives only with the organ- 
ism, but mind as one aspect of a persistent ultimate, the 
correlated unit of relative being, lives, and feels increas- 
ingly so long as the atom of matter exists. It is a part 
of an established constitution, destructible only by annul- 
ling its correlations and returning its specialized power 
back into the Absolute. 

It may seem unfair to prejudice either position, each of 
which must of course stand or fall upon its own merits 
according to the evidence which it can bring to its sup- 
port, independent of what must be nearly, if not quite, 
the universal desire for a conscious immortality. No such 
predisposition was meant to be invoked. As we desire 
life here, and yet all die organically, if we are destined 
also to a final conscious death, we must accept the inevi- 
table. But this is the real question : Is immortality or 
continuous life a constitutional necessity, which makes 
life and consciousness as fundamental a fact as existence 

270 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 2? I 

itself ? or is life and mind a property of the organism in 
much the same sense that the liquid state of water is a 
property of the two gases oxygen and hydrogen when 
combined, though it is not a property of either gas 
separately ? 

There are other theories of matter and mind. Body 
and soul are supposed to be separate entities, each dis- 
tinct in itself, but working for the present along parallel 
lines, yet destined to be finally separated, the body 
returning into its elements and the soul or mind pursuing 
its own destiny on independent lines. The entire argu- 
ment for the constitutional correlation of mind and matter 
and of all other phenomena is in direct disproof of this 
position. The supposed outcome is satisfactory, but the 
hypothetic method of achieving it seems to be quite out 
of line with the common order of nature. There can be 
no actual entities except the one self-existent or persistent 
absolute power ! So much of that power as is detailed to 
the individual to be utilized by its correlated methods 
can have no need of two independent sets of conditions 
to which it must conform in the upbuilding of two dis- 
tinct individualities, provided one method with its two 
aspects and one individuality will serve all purposes as 
well or better. 

But it is not needful to repeat arguments which are 
expressed or implied in the entire theory that the correla- 
tion of active co-operations is the only creation and the 
effective inauguration of all relative existence. In a 
qualified sense these individuals are entities. The power 
which informs them is practically their sole substantial 
being, and its conditioned manifestations their individual 
work and experience. On the mind-side, the abidingness 
and the change may become conscious possessions. 

The still prevalent belief that soul and body are not 
one but two undoubtedly receives a heavy blow from the 
accumulation of carefully tested facts, which seem to 



272 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

prove that, as both are affected as nearly simultaneously 
by the same causes as the transmission rates from the 
sense organs to the brain will permit, the motion and 
the feeling both have the same causes. A ratio of rela- 
tions is everywhere manifest, and in some very definite 
sense objective causes produce the feelings as really as 
they produce the physical organic modifications. The 
blow which bruises the flesh is felt by the mind at just 
the difference of time which it takes waves of energy to 
travel from hand to brain along a nerve route. 

Then is there sufficient reason for assuming that 
motion is everywhere attended by feeling nascent or self- 
conscious? 

If we consider, first, the negative evidence — prevising 
that every feeling, like every motion, must be exclusively 
atomic — we readily see that no individual could manifest 
its feeling to another except through an adapted organ- 
ism or some other helpful mechanism.- Nor could the 
observer be made aware of it in any known way except 
by the help of an organism of his own. In the inorganic 
world, one atom co-working with many others, however 
sensitive it might be to every change of mode, would be 
shut up within itself as to its feelings in the same way that 
it is hedged about on all sides as to its motions. In that 
condition, according to hypothesis, its changes are 
rhythmic in kind, and in general are repeated in a long 
succession of similar cycles of motion ; hence the feeling 
could be but a monotonous round of successive similar 
feelings, and even this dead level of sensation would have 
no way of transmitting itself outside of its immediate 
environment, because it would have no adequate facilities 
for communicating its modes of motion to other beings 
who might be made to appreciate its corresponding 
feelings. 

Any particle in a common lump of iron or of clay, be- 
cause compounded with others of its kind, is checked in 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 273 

dynamical modes and kept largely in a but slightly 
alternating condition of much tension with its enforced 
comparative rest. Its vibrators, held through opposed 
co-operation with neighboring atoms in an only slightly 
varied state of dull, downright strain, could receive and 
could initiate but very slight sensations of any kind. 
When we consider what must be the nature of the opera- 
tions of knowing and of remembering — processes to be 
discussed later on — we shall realize that an immeasurable 
past existence in which real sentience has successively 
arisen of this low order, could prove nothing against the 
theory that feeling is the living aspect of motion, and that 
both are individual functions. 

Personal consciousness is held to be a process, an ever 
onflowing continuity of feeling, affected through precisely 
analogous conditions to those which simultaneously pro- 
duce the continuous onflow of harmonic motions in every 
rhythmic atom. The sum of the simultaneous feeling, 
like the sum of the simultaneous vibrations, constitutes 
the feeling, as the motion does the material action, of that 
atom at that instant. The recurring phases of either 
kind can never be exactly identical, because ideal divisions 
of time discriminate between them, equally measuring the 
onflow of the intensive and of the extensive changes. 

Every true individuality, primarily conditioned through 
its own innate correlativities. modified in form from moment 
to moment through varying external co-operations, is liter- 
ally composed of one complex stream of endless, double- 
phased modifications, which, regarded in one aspect, must be 
defined as motions, vibrations ; and in the other aspect, as 
emotions, feelings, thoughts. It follows that physical and 
psychical modes neither are, nor in the nature of things 
ever can be, mutually convertible. As easily transform 
some of the roundness of an orange into its golden color, 
so that the orange should then have more of color but less 

of roundness, as transmute a least quantity of motion into 
18 



274 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

feeling, so that there should be less motion in the world 
but more of feeling, or vice versa. 

With the materialists, we hold that a personal mind is 
the stream of consciousness produced by the co-operations 
of the body. Unlike materialists, we maintain that every 
endless stream of modes — of merely formal changes, ma- 
terial and mental — is structurally, constitutionally a stream 
of atomic changes. The larger bodily, and other mass 
processes, composed of groups of these atomic streams, 
are not endless. They begin and end with the organism 
or the mass. They are the organism or the mass. They 
change in quantities and modes from moment to moment ; 
and because of such variations, the endless rhythms of 
the atoms become modified also through co-operation ; 
but motion and emotion vary together ! It appears also 
that both the onflow of motion and resultant emotion, 
when either is to gain in available power which can become 
utilized by the individual, has been conditioned in absolute 
dependence upon co-operations with other similarly con- 
stituted mind-matter individuals. One alone would be 
but an eternal repetition of itself, alike in physical and in 
psychical changes. We must act for ourselves, but it is 
equally true that we must coact with our kindred, and gain 
all of our higher experiences and purposes in absolute 
dependence upon their help. 

No one could strike a blow with a mallet if there were 
no mallet to wield. No one could build up his organic 
body if no food existed which he could assimilate. Then 
is it more strange or more incredible that no one could 
live the higher mental life if no other beings, constituted 
after types mentally and physically similar to one's own, 
existed to co-operate with us in securing these most 
desirable higher and nobler mental ends and aims ? 

The development of a mind is doubtless effected through 
the assistance given by its organism, yet the same kind of 
development might be secured to it in ways greatly dis- 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 275 

similar from the present one, provided it could secure the 
co-operation of other systems of motion, with or without 
self-conscious emotion sides of their own. It is the mind 
aspect in every atom which enables it to become growingly 
diverse in its own conscious processes, with the possibility 
of reviving, automatically or at will, many of its past modes. 
The manner in which any given modification is called into 
action can be of no real importance. Different causes, 
acting through dissimilar methods, may produce about 
the same results of associated movement and feeling. As 
nearly the same feeling and about the same physical 
effects can be produced by those exact opposites, heat 
and cold, when either is extreme enough to destroy living 
tissue, so causes, however dissimilar — provided through 
their help modifications are revived like those of the past 
— must revive that recognized renewal of living experience 
which we call memory. 

Remembering must be exclusively individual, since, in 
the nature of the case, no one can recall for himself the 
experience of another. But the remembering is no more 
personal than the feeling remembered ! Feeling is in 
perpetual change, but the one personal stream of change 
is found non-transferable, whether the changes are material 
or mental. 

Dynamic modes include both lively motions and lively 
emotions. Static modes represent the individual share of 
opposed energies holding each other in check, which is 
psychical as well as physical. Such mental terms as the 
me, the self, the Ego ; and such material terms as the 
rhythmic, the primary, the ultimate atom, all are held to 
properly pertain to the same individuality — the motion- 
feeling unit of conditioned being. 

By hypothesis there is no finite soul without its own 
inseparable finite body, the personal soma; no ultimate 
physical atom without its inseparable finite soul, mind, 
life. Thus every limited mind in all of its extensive phases 



276 THE PHLO SOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

is a limited and conditioned piece of matter, and every 
ultimate particle of matter, in all of its intensive phases, 
is a potential mind, a soul ; a personal life, ready for all 
possible intensive modifications. The Ego, therefore, is 
a mind-matter Ego, and must be understood in that 
broader sense. 

We have already seen in what different ways modes of 
motion may be supposed to become transformed through 
diverse co-operations. We have seen that the more com- 
plex the co-operations between the atoms, the more 
complex must be the motion-phases within each of the 
co-operating atoms ; that the more extensive the copart- 
nership, the more available may be the help of all the 
others to any one atom in its transformations to new and 
unusual modes. Now we are required only to realize that 
every Ego in a living organism must have an endless flow 
of sub-conscious or conscious personal feeling in perfect, im- 
mediate correspondence with its complex, rhythmic motion. 
But what kind of motion, hence what kind of feeling shall 
we find to be possible or probable for the majority ? 

Every atom is alive, if the power which informs its 
ever changing modalities is living power ; but since its 
personal feeling, its present active vitality, must depend 
wholly upon its own present modifications, the lower 
classes of modes can give it nothing more than nascent 
feeling — sensation of the lowest varieties, to which mem- 
ory is impossible, because recognition is impossible. 

Life in the organic sense is made up of the definitely 
co-ordinated processes of associated individual lives. The 
total is fittingly expressed by the common term life, rep- 
resenting the psychical side of the entire copartnership. 
The organic life is the associated life of the firm, not 
that of any individual member of the firm. It indicates 
a unity in the specialized modes of co-operation which 
tends towards a common end — that of promoting the 
general interest of the firm as a whole. 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 277 

Organic partnerships are distinguished from inorganic 
partnerships by the manifest broad division in method 
which effectively marks off the organic from the inorganic 
kingdom. In the inorganic world there is no least trace 
of a shared purpose or of any action whatever towards a 
common end. The combining modes of the several units 
composing an inorganic substance work together as purely 
mechanically as the wheels and pulleys of any machine. 
Even the supposed " affinities " among the chemical ele- 
ments were never interpreted to be anything more than 
individual affinities. No atom was ever supposed to act 
in the interest of the whole body of which it formed a 
part. The transmission of energy in all of its forms ap- 
pears to be equally purposeless ; and so of any inorganic 
process. It is this evident non-forecasting in all inorganic 
operations which largely has given rise to the expressive 
phrase dead matter. 

But in every organic process, even in the very lowest 
living mass, every unit of the multitude, under normal 
conditions, is utilized in some way that tends towards the 
common advantage of the organism. Each atom of a sin- 
gle-celled algae takes a distinct part in building up the living 
whole ; it is utilized not entirely in its own interest, but defi- 
nitely in the interests of the organic cell and of its living 
descendants. The cell is an orderly, active copartnership, 
the end (not the distinct, conscious aim) of which seems to 
be the evolution of individual sentience. In the algae it 
is very primary sensation — nevertheless it is personal sen- 
sation presumably. At any rate, every Ego in the cell 
helps to achieve a definitely organized work in so sys- 
tematic a manner that each completed cell is enabled to 
initiate other cells like itself ad infinitum. The help then 
is mutual. 

In this organic sense each Ego of every organism tends 
to achieve an orderly co-operative work, after a definite 
method of co-operating for the common welfare — an asso- 



278 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

ciative method which has no parallel in the inorganic 
world. 

Associative organic process which normally tends to 
promote the utilization and renewal of the organism in 
its totality and in every detail is the one distinctive 
feature which distinguishes organic from inorganic 
methods. 

In every organism all work tends towards the good of 
the whole, and that good is psychical in kind, at least to 
the dominant mind. Also, associated with this distinc- 
tively psychical gain, arise commensurate physical gains 
superior to any advantages to be derived from merely 
inorganic combinations, such as voluntary motion. 
With inorganic masses, no common end is obviously 
promoted by co-operation. An iron bar is useful, but 
not to itself. Whoever can make it available in the 
furtherance of his independent purposes, may do so ; 
but to the bar itself, its size, its shape, its position, the 
purposes for which it is employed seem to be utterly 
indifferent. On the contrary, every organism must 
physically suffer when not so placed that it can readily 
assimilate, utilize, and reject the material adapted to 
promote organic gain and the endless active processes 
designated by the general term growth. Inorganic pro- 
cess is mainly static ; its co-operations are local in 
combinations, and the resulting free heat is distributed 
entirely fortuitously. Gravitative strain originates mass 
motions, but these also arise from mechanical accidental 
co-operations ; there is no free motion which can be 
considered to be immediately directed towards the fur- 
therance of definite ends. 

There is no quantitative gain in the inorganic world 
beyond that of aggregation for one body at the expense 
of some other. The changes are all changes of modes or 
of places, and as exchanges they are but the transfer of 
equivalent quantities with no gain whatever in the traffic 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 279 

unless mind intervenes in some way to utilize the product 
for its own purposes. In such a world the qualitative 
gains necessarily are also at a minimum. 

But the fundamental processes in every organism are 
cumulative. The one province of the organic is to organ- 
ize, to utilize fresh material for the higher organic needs. 
In this way it secures a constant increase of physical 
values, and its still more distinctive gains are purely 
psychical. Organic process is the evolution of dynamic 
process. It is the evolution of co-operations of the higher 
dynamic order. Its processes are those in which the freer 
energies are received and transformed either into tensions 
or into non-available free modes, and then given up suc- 
cessively, while yet other free modes are similarly utilized 
— all in the interest of distinctively progressive ends. 

Of course there is no actual physical increase except 
that of increase in physical efficiency of structure. But 
increase in structural possibilities is a positive increase in 
available power. It is a new ability to command the 
most active modes of material force, and an equal ability 
to command practically the previously most inactive ma- 
terial forces. In other words, it is the increasing ability 
of the organism to co-operate with and to co-ordinate 
both external tensions and free motions by means of its 
organic gains and its consequent superior activities, and 
to use its co-workers for the attainment of yet greater 
structural possibilities. 

This is the physical work of organic life. 

But at every point and in every phase of work there is 
the commensurate psychical gain, and while that also is 
co-operative, it nevertheless must be purely individual 
feeling, nascent or conscious. In one mind it is tending 
to forever deepen and broaden into those new and higher 
modes of feeling which must be distinguished from the 
earlier primary sensations and even from all current 
sensations. These higher rational feelings have dis- 



28o THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

tinctive names, as perception, conception, thought, 
imagination, knowledge, purpose. Psychical gain is 
not merely a formal gain and not simply the guid- 
ance of co-operative physical gain ; it is actual increase 
of feeling, though it may or may not be a widening of 
feeling into ever new varieties. 

The feeling must arise in exact correspondence with its 
somatic modifications ; hence in the organism where there 
is growth both in quantity and in definite structure and 
its functions, with the resulting physical availability of 
power, the actual increase of individual feeling must be 
in proportion to any one somatic share in such co-opera- 
tive processes. Mental gain is never merely nominal, nor 
can it be if sentience is, as we assume, cumulative in kind, 
not the mere conversion of one mode into another mode. 
There is no real increase in amount of motion in the 
physical world, inorganic or organic. There is perpetual 
increase of feeling in the psychical world even when asso- 
ciated with unorganized matter, which is incalculably in- 
creased and broadened in efficiency in all of the higher 
organisms to the one dominant mind. 

These three queries then come to the front : 
i. Is the mind in each higher organism a separate soul 
which somehow works in connection with the body, 
which acts upon the body and is acted upon by it, but is 
entirely distinct from it and will become a separate being 
after the body dies ? On this view enough perhaps has 
been said, or will be said inferentially during the remain- 
der of the discussion. 

2. Is mind the outcome, the result of organized matter? 
This position it is proposed to discuss somewhat at length. 

3. Is the leading mind in each higher organism a devel- 
oped personal or atomic sensibility ? And must we 
suppose also that in all organic process there is the sen- 
tient co-operation of many nascent minds, and that 
sentience, instinctive or conscious, is the distinctive stimu- 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 28 1 

lation which associately determines organization and its 
functions? 

Query 3 is the one which we endeavor to answer in the 
affirmative in all of its divisions in the course of the pres- 
ent full inquiry. The argument cannot be given in a 
paragraph or a chapter. But it may be an advantage to 
bear in mind that the distinctive position of the present 
essay is, that while one highly evolved mind directs the 
larger part of all rational processes pertaining to a human 
being or to one of the higher animals, yet that many 
nascent minds instinctively aid in the furtherance of all 
nutritive and kindred functions. 

But to assign a common, a joint sensibility to an organ- 
ism in any other sense than that in which we suppose a 
common feeling in the men of an army all intent on 
marching together to the field of battle, seems to be 
highly unphilosophical and outside the pale of clear think- 
ing. A motion and a feeling can be thought of as two 
sides of one change ; but to suppose my feeling in another 
mind is as preposterous as to suppose that the motion of 
my arm is the motion of my friend's arm. Neither mo- 
tion nor feeling can get outside of the something which 
feels and moves. 

The kind or mode of feeling and the kind or mode of 
motion can be communicated — the feeling to other minds, 
the motion to other motions. But feeling and motion 
are not mutually exchangeable even in that sense. Feel- 
ing and motion as two unlike faces of one force are not 
convertible in any sense, though if the one changes the 
other must change correlatively. 

Combined motion is only a closely associated group of 
motion-units. No one of these units can lose, transfer, 
exchange, or give away its own motion or any part of it. 
The entire co-operation between them is the correlative 
mutual modification, and sometimes the exchange of their 
several ways of moving. Composite feeling, a fusion of 



282 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

several individual separate feelings, is even more incredi- 
ble than exchanged actual motion, since feeling is so 
palpably, so obtrusively, so convincingly personal. 

The theory of ultimate and persistent atoms must be 
given up, or else the assumption that either motion or 
feeling can possibly be anything else than exclusively 
atomic must be given up ! Granted the rhythmic atom, 
this conclusion is too obvious to need arguing ; but as- 
suming that the atom is anything persistent, say an 
elastic solid, moved about by outside force, yet such an 
atom must move for itself alone. No other can possibly 
share its motion. Several may be united and move on 
together, taking the same direction at the same rate ; yet 
each moves for itself. The motion of the whole number 
is one motion only in the same sense in which one moving 
earful of people is one motion. Car-loads of individuals 
in motion only share in the common rate and direction. 
For convenience' sake we call it one motion, as fifty and 
fifty units are called one hundred. The hundred is still a 
hundred units ; and in just as literal a sense the so-called 
one motion of any mass or number of particles can mean 
nothing more than that, each particle moving for itself, 
the whole is conveniently grouped under one collective 
term. 

We affirm unqualifiedly that, from the necessity of things, 
motion of any kind whatever never can be anything except 
individual motion. When the individual is moved as a 
whole, that is one kind of motion ; but it must pertain to 
the individual exclusively. And when a part of the same 
individual is moved in relation to some other part — much 
the more general type of motion, that also is motion 
which pertains exclusively to the individual. 

No other can take that phase of motion in that place — 
that is, he cannot take that motion, though he can take 
that mode of motion, with a true ongoing continuity in 
space and in time. 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 283 

Suppose that an army of men moves forward, keeping 
step. They carry baggage, and from time to time per- 
form various orderly but exhausting feats at the com- 
mand of the general. One by one the weary men drop 
out of the ranks. Fresh recruits step into their places, 
and volunteers so crowd into every possible opening, 
that, as an army, there is a continual growth in power, in 
numbers, and in eager activity, though nearly the entire 
force has changed as to its individual men. Suppose that 
the commander himself, when he is over-weary, is ac- 
customed to fall asleep and is then borne forward, pos- 
sibly upon the shoulders of the rank and file, who, with- 
out breaking step, continue to march a little more carefully 
and slowly. When the general awakens he resumes com- 
mand and urges forward the great enterprise he has in 
view — the tired men dropping in exhaustion, but new 
ones taking their places, and unfalteringly seconding his 
mandates. Such an army would very closely realize the 
plan of both mental and physical co-operation in any one 
of the higher organisms while still in the stage of vigor- 
ous mental and physical growth. 

With community of motion, each moves for himself ; 
with community of feeling, each feels for himself, but the 
motion and the feeling in each are both modified by asso- 
ciation with the army as a whole, and by its methods of 
executing the plans and purposes of their leader. Every 
man may have a like feeling at the same moment, a feel- 
ing produced by the same event. It is customary to say 
that they all share a common feeling ; but the feeling is 
strictly personal, is common feeling in no other sense than 
the simultaneous lifting of the right foot and putting it 
down again at the same instant is a common motion. If 
all their hands were interlocked, and raised and lowered 
together, yet the raising and the lowering would still be 
exclusively the movement of individual hands, and what- 
ever feeling attended the motion would be personal feeling. 



284 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

To assume that any one man in such an army, even the 
general himself, could feel literally for any other than 
himself, would be preposterous. Yet if all came under 
the influence of the same motive, the same mode of feel- 
ing might arise in each, precisely as the same mode of 
motion is simultaneous with each. The stream of succes- 
sive feelings which must flow on in the consciousness of 
any one of these men in the marching army may be 
likened to the onflow of lifelong personal feeling in any 
one of ourselves. 

But to liken the intimate thoughts and emotions which 
make up the ever increasing sum of our own individual, 
vivid life, to the aggregate of feeling in that whole advan- 
cing army, is as unphilosophical as to assume that the wav- 
ing of my hand can absorb into itself the waving of a thou- 
sand other hands in similar directions. One motion can 
change the direction of another ; it can never become that 
other. The laws which govern the composition of motions 
are laws which pertain to the directions, the rates, the 
endless co-operations, the modes in general of merely 
formal exchanges in ways of moving. It would be need- 
less to dwell upon the distinction between exchanges of 
modes physical or psychical and the supposed taking on 
of another's feeling or moving for one's self, if endless con- 
fusion had not arisen from the lack of discrimination be- 
tween things so totally dissimilar and yet so closely 
related that the distinction has not been clearly obvious. 

The theory of an organic consciousness is one of the 
fruits of this pseud-thinking. A rational explanation of 
the nature of motion — that is, of matter which is motion — 
has been prevented by it. Even supposing matter to be 
non-atomic, having no indivisible unit, but everywhere 
separable into parts, still each piece, large or small, must 
have its own properties intact. If some of its properties 
are motions, and if under organic conditions they may 
become feelings ; if an organism becomes but one co- 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 285 

operative piece of matter ; even then, that any organic 
part, as a hand or a finger, can either move or feel for any- 
other part, as a foot or a toe, is unthinkable. Unless we 
assume that the organism becomes a true unit in that 
sense which requires change anywhere within it to involve 
change throughout every part — as by hypothesis it does 
in an ultimate atom, — motion felt by the organism as a 
whole is inconceivable. 

A property of anything must be a property of the total 
something. If the something is divided, in each part the 
property will be less in amount but not different in kind ; 
and the sum of the property in the several parts must be 
the same as before the division. The sweetness in sugar 
can be divided and added as amounts like the substance 
sugar. Then is there a different mind-property in each 
organ, perhaps in each tissue of the organism ? If not, 
when a soldier loses an arm and a leg, has he lost a part 
of his mind ? Difficulties thicken with every attempt to 
make mind a property or a function either of the whole 
organism or of the brain alone. If it is a function of each 
atomic unit, all difficulties vanish and all facts are simpli- 
fied ;• feeling like motion arises from correlated co-opera- 
tion ; but in one persisting unity. 

Why might we not as logically suppose the flow of a 
river at any one special place to become conscious, so that 
all the water successively passing onward should just there 
awaken to a variety of sensations, as to imagine conscious- 
ness to be the self-realizing flow of organic process in either 
brain or organism ? Neither of them is the same in sub- 
stance for an hour together. To make feeling the accepted 
conscious side of many co-ordinated motions requires more 
than any yet current explanation of the unthinkable 
proposition. 

Feeling must be harmonic in kind, successive in its 
endlessly changing pulses of feeling, if adequate to estab- 
lish abiding self-consciousness. Translation of any kind, 



286 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

as the onflow of water or of organic process, is the suc- 
cessive movement of many across a common field. Change, 
physical or psychical, in order to belong in continuity to 
one and the same system, in order to remain an individual 
attribute with endless modifications, must be change 
within the system itself, and the system, as a system, must 
be persistent. 

We may liken both the modes of motion and those of 
emotion pertaining to any individual to the unbroken 
succession of shadow forms cast by one and the same 
body. They are never the same at any two moments 
from sunrise to sunrise, yet they are never absent even 
though invisible, and must dimly persist in the darkest 
midnight, since the darkest hour is only a relative dark- 
ness. These shadow wraiths are not the substance 
which they represent, but they arise from the active 
properties of the substance to which they pertain — when 
stimulated by light. So long as the body and the light 
both exist, in a like unending continuity, the ever chang- 
ing shadow must exist, as well defined in its kind as they 
in theirs. 

Motion and feeling, as we know them, are the ever 
varying affections of Relative Being. If correlated indi- 
viduals exist and persist, as science is becoming more and 
more assured that they do, their properties must arise in 
continuity of successive modifiable changes within each 
individual for itself exclusively. The indivisible physical 
atom is not positively accepted by all physicists, possibly ; 
yet it is the only logical inference from multitudes of 
related facts, and indivisible mental experience is an 
equally necessary conclusion which soon or late must gain 
full recognition. 

Prof. Bain is right in affirming : " We have every reason 
for believing that there is, in company with all our men- 
tal processes, an unbroken material succession. From the 
ingress of a sensation to the outgoing responses in action 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 28? 

the mental succession is not for an instant dissevered from 
a physical succession." J 

We entirely endorse also his conclusion " The argu- 
ments for two substances have, we believe, now en- 
tirely lost their validity ; they are no longer compatible 
with ascertained science and clear thinking. The one 
substance, with two sets of properties, two sides, the 
physicial and the mental — a double-faced unity — would 
appear to comply with all the exigencies of the case." a 

Yet Prof. Bain makes conscious mind one face, not of 
one unit of mind-matter, but of sensible nerve tracts, of 
the nervous system and of the organism as co-operative 
whole. This is his constant inference if not so stated in 
direct conclusion. Lester F. Ward, in Dynamic Sociol- 
ogy, says : " We cannot conceive of our minds as the 
result of organized matter. Yet if candid, we must admit 
that they are just this; for if our brain were reduced to 
sixty-five cubic inches, or deprived of the delicately 
organized tissues of vessels and nerve matter of which it 
is composed, we should be idiots instead of rational 
beings." 3 

But children's brains, though not reduced to sixty-five 
cubic inches, having not yet grown beyond that size, do 
not produce traces of idiocy, and the ant with its mustard- 
seed cranium is about the most intelligent being on any 
lower level than man. Arrested growth in any organ, of 
course, means arrested use of that organ. A black- 
smith with the weak muscles of a ten-year-old boy or of 
most women and many men, would be an idiotic black- 
smith. He must make himself progressively muscular, in 
part by arm exercise, and in part by the natural growth 
and strength of the whole co-operative organism. Many 
a weak-minded, because weak-brained, child has been 

1 Mind and Body \ pp. 130, 131. 

9 P. 196. 

8 Dynamic Sociology, vol. 1, pp. 368, 369. 



288 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

lured away from idiocy by the continued and varied exer- 
cise of both mind and brain ; and even semi-paralysis can 
be cured by co-operation with some adapted stimulation. 

We may not even state the question in this way : Does 
the brain develop mind? or does the mind develop brain ? 
Is organism before function, or is function before organ- 
ism ? Like every other correlative process the two arise 
in co-operation. The fundamental point is : What do 
they arise from ? Is Bain justified in assuming that mind 
and matter are two sets of modes or properties which 
arise together as two aspects of one substance (as two 
jointly conditioned sides of a method through which one 
power is brought into differentiated exercise ), or is Ward 
justified in supposing that mind arises as an offshoot 
from active and highly organized matter ? 

Since sentience of a high order is the later development, 
there seems a glimmer of reason for the latter theory. 
But mind is supremely the superior. It seems reasonable 
to suppose that matter is constitutionally the born ser- 
vitor and factotum of the mind ! Certainly Ward can 
hardly be justified in questioning the honesty of any who 
refuse to admit an asserted fact which yet " we cannot 
conceive of." One is bound to have great respect for a 
wholesomely conservative agnosticism. What we don't 
know, we are not at all certain that we shall never know ; 
but what we cannot conceive of, we certainly cannot 
know and should not " admit." 

If the one and only relative ultimate is total matter, 
and this matter is the only self-existent ; if it moves 
through an endless round of changes — changes in one 
portion of it increasingly complex and dense, and in other 
portions of it decreasingly complex and diffuse in propor- 
tion — of course in such a world real and permanent gain 
to matter or to mind is innately impossible ! Opportunity 
is open for making hay energetically and even delightfully 
while the sun shines upon the vast organic cycle of 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 289 

changes. It can evolve lively feeling, with intellect 
enough to learn increasingly how to adapt means to sen- 
tient ends, which may be either personal or may include 
the broader prolonged interests of a longer or shorter 
surviving humanity, helped upwards or downwards by 
the operation of the laws of inheritance. 

After that the deluge ! Not because one desires this, 
but because Nature is inexorable. Probably also she is 
as helpless as we are, and far more blind. 

But materialists do not claim to explain either the 
origin or the methods of a growing sensibility ! Prof. 
Ward admits the probability that nascent sensibility per- 
tains to matter prior to organization — the probability 
also that matter is persistently atomic. He is right, then, 
in reasoning that Dissolution is as truly a law of being as 
Evolution — taking the universe as a whole. 

But such a universe can offer no rational explanation 
either of matter or of its properties, physical or psychical ! 
To begin with, matter itself is undefinable. Motion and 
mind, its most characteristic processes, cannot be actually 
defined ; they can only be christened properties of the 
undefinable substance. This, in its turn, depends upon 
our senses as its highest justification. But unless we point 
out the nature of the affiliation between motion and 
" matter," and between feeling and matter, in thinkable 
relations, not in generalities — the step-ladder method of 
explaining Nature without really explaining either the 
first step or any succeeding one, though the steps follow 
consecutively, — this gives neither a thinkable science nor 
a thinkable philosophy. 

We may think in general terms, provided we first think 
the concrete terms, but not otherwise, unless we are con- 
tent to think as inadequately as a child sees. 

Provided Nature is a correlated whole, (and if not, what 
is it? what does Relative mean in distinction from 
Absolute ?) it is a thinkable whole to any mind which is 



29O THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

able to comprehend it in its totality. Actual correlation 
must be both ideal and real — that is, subjectively it is a 
thinkable process, and objectively it is the process itself. 

We shall all admit that organic life is organic process, 
and that the two must end together. But life and mind, 
the sentient side of a conditioned unit of matter or 
motion, is an entirely conceivable, relative existence. 

We cannot too strongly emphasize the claim that a 
correlated universe can be progressively thought and com- 
prehended. It can be actually recognized, and so far as 
it becomes known this may be a real knowledge to any 
intelligence which is itself a part of the working correla- 
tivity. But an object can be known to us only just in 
so far as the mind is brought into active co-operations 
with it in the same continuous process. The co-operation 
may be extremely indirect, but it must be a true working 
partnership between object and subject. Then knowledge 
may become actual knowledge. 

Motion and feeling admittedly do arise together in the 
same substance, in complex organisms at least. We our- 
selves feel ourselves to be moving, and know that the 
motion is inseparable from the sensation, provided the 
sensation is attending to the movement. The mental 
co-operation is as essential a part of the knowledge as is 
the motion itself. The same something both moves and 
feels ; and the modifications of either motion or feeling 
must arise as co-operation with some phase of change 
which is outside of itself. Co-operation is only another 
name for action and reaction, which are always exact 
equivalents. If the feeling is atomic and the sensitive 
aspect of every atomic change, there are not two forces, 
the one in the feeling and the other in the motion, but 
the one force expresses itself in correlated feeling and 
movement ; in space the one, in consciousness the other. 

Co-operation is equivalence — that is, it must become 
equalized in some way between all co-operative terms; 



ORGANIC LIFE AND MIND. 29 1 

yet one or other must take the initiative as direct stimu- 
lus to every modification of process. Mind can modify 
matter through the mediation of its soma. Matter can 
modify mind through action upon the soma. But the 
propositions which we shall attempt to establish are that 
in inorganic masses motion takes the initiative, but in all 
working organization it is feeling which takes the initiative. 
Thus organic life is co-operation engendered by feeling. 

Space and feeling having no aspects in common, mate- 
rial changes of form and place, which altogether arise in 
space, and mental changes of feeling, which altogether 
arise in consciousness, must be intelligently related in 
thought, and it must be shown that, from the nature of 
both, the one can be rationally supposed to arise as an 
outgrowth of the other, before we are called upon to 
accept that account of the origin of mind. 

As two equivalent working factors, in its earlier stages, 
mind is utterly dependent upon matter for the beginning 
of a sentient evolution. But at that time matter is about 
as unable to help as mind is to be helped. In the organ- 
ism a new efficiency has been reached for a co-operation 
special in kind and marvellous in its results. But its 
value would decrease a hundred-fold if, with each unit 
of being, mind and matter are not the inseparably corre- 
lated aspects of one persistent individuality. 




ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 

If matter and mind are differenced manifestations of 
one force, it necessarily is impossible to treat of either 
without the other ; yet attention may sometimes be 
profitably turned to the processes of the one rather than 
to those of the other. If they are non-convertible, then 
every physical feature must be maintained in its integrity, 
whatever may be the nature or the extent of the psychical 
co-operation. Every material modification must arise in 
continuity with some prior material mode. It should be 
quite possible, then, to gain distinct conceptions of the 
main differences between organic and inorganic methods. 

The most obvious distinction is, that the type of in- 
organic growth is that of simple aggregation, of additions 
not accompanied by related, partially balancing subtrac- 
tions. But in organic growth additions are always ac- 
companied by subtractions, which in a condition of active 
vigor are in the minority, but which in age or weakness 
may increase to the majority. All organic process is be- 
lieved to be twofold in this sense ; but no inorganic pro- 
cess is twofold in the sense that increase is ever coupled 
with a corresponding diminution which is of necessity a 
part of the same co-operation. 

All use means wear and tear to everything inorganic ; 
it means positive and often rapid increase to everything 
organic — provided it is not excessive. The inorganic has 
no real recuperative power, but organization is recupera- 
tion. It is the addition of working strength and energy 

292 



ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 293 

as part of a common fund. In inorganic growth dynamic 
force is given away. In organic growth dynamic force is 
taken in and incorporated. 

A solution of alum, under favoring conditions, will grow 
rapidly into larger and larger crystals. Water, spread 
upon the window pane at the freezing point, aided by the 
surface upon which the moisture condenses, will seem to 
grow like flowers, ferns, and trees. If a part of the crys- 
tallization is broken off it may even be made to grow 
again, but both the growth and the renewal are increase 
by additions with no related decrease. 

In petrifactions the original tissues may entirely disap- 
pear and a mineral form of the structure take its place 
with beautiful exactness, but here there is neither increase 
nor decrease, except that the mineral substance has more 
density than the organic matter which it displaces. The 
change in the composition of minerals produced by a 
combination of causes, physical and chemical, may be 
considered a species of growth of the same general class. 
Among solids and fluids the substitution of one substance 
by another in chemical compounds is effected upon a like 
mechanical basis. One substance leaves and another 
takes its place, but the new element produces a new com- 
pound, and it does this by additions which have no neces- 
sary connection with the departing element. The new 
combination could be made entirely independently. All 
inorganic growth will be found to belong to the type of co- 
partnership in which the added partners come in as equals 
and come to remain indefinitely. Each portion of the 
inorganic mass is approximately homogeneous with the 
rest of the same substance. Differences which manifest 
themselves mainly in form and direction, as in crystals — 
partly obvious to sense and in part made evident by the 
action of light in transparent bodies — are only such as 
arise from the co-partnerships of motion oppositely 
directed and various in method. 



294 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

The growth and the renewal are external accretions — 
joined by cohesion or other local co-operation — whenever 
and wherever the process is inorganic. Moreover, in such 
aggregations there is loss of dynamic modes with increase 
of tension. Action within the tension is static, except 
that there still is interchange of heat and other migratory 
modes, and there is the exchanged pull of gravitation. 
The more intimate the union in such growth, the more 
lumpy and inert the externally manifested properties. 
Condensation is the inorganic death ; the uncondensed is 
the living force. 

But organic growth is dynamic growth. All manifested 
sentient life comes through organization. Other things 
equal, the more compactly and structurally organized, the 
more varied and versatile the forms of activity. Both 
motion and emotion then become innate. The insect, a 
little compendium of organization, is an endless arrow of 
motion and unrest. Every animal lives to move, and 
moves to live ; and there is no unit of growth which does 
not increase organic activity. The stately rigidity in the 
massive trunk of a tree is only an apparent exception to 
the law. The nutritive circulation, which is the growth 
method, is active ; and the utilized rigidity is mainly 
inorganic deposit. Leaf and bud, and living tissue, as a 
whole, are manifest reversals of all inorganic internal 
process. 

The plant has gone up but a few steps along the stair- 
way of sentience-guided co-operation ; yet even it reverses 
Mr. Spencer's growth-dictum — that evolution is attended 
by the integration of matter and the disintegration of 
motion, and dissolution by the disintegration of matter 
and the integration of motion. In all organic growth 
there is not only aggregation of matter, but pre-eminently 
organization is the endless accumulator and user of dy- 
namic energy, brought to it from many sources in an in- 
creasing supply. Not till the organizing process is on the 



ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 295 

wane, does the free absorption and the conversion of all 
varieties of free motion into organic utilities also begin 
to decrease. 

The phenomena of organic dissolution pertain in part 
to organic methods because the tissues and the " physio- 
logical units " do not die at the same time with the organic 
commonwealth. But the sensible phenomena, at this 
stage, pertain rather to the inorganic than to the organic 
types ! 

A higher organism stores up motion in such ways and 
in such quantities that it is available, is " on demand," in 
almost any and every direction. The more complex, com- 
pact, and minutely adapted to division of labor, special 
to the differentiated parts of the organic whole, and the 
more vigorous and active the growing conditions, the 
larger is the provident store of energy on call. The more 
numerous the many curious and remarkable adaptations 
inwrought in the structure itself, the more does this ena- 
ble the controlling mind to use the store of ready-made 
strength, of accumulated free motion, in the furtherance of 
whatever methods or ends it pleases. 

The famous " law of evolution " is true in general in the 
inorganic kingdom, provided we assume that the forma- 
tion of definite large masses, as planets, satellites, and suns, 
and of the solid bodies upon the surfaces of some of these, is 
really an evolution. With all tension-forming, as a rule, free 
motion is dissipated ; and with the relaxed or dissociated 
tension, the free motion is reabsorbed. But as tension is 
obstructed motion — is work so antagonized that it be- 
comes as no work, — is that condition, considered in and 
of itself, an evolution or a retrogression ? 

As solidified location, for the benefit of organized be- 
ings with their appreciative minds, one planet at any rate 
we know to be extremely useful. Most of its surface 
masses are becoming, in rapidly increasing new ways, even 
more helpful to the men of to-day than they were to the 



296 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

ancestors of old. But to itself, if it were able to appre- 
ciate the situation, the poor old earth has lost, and not 
gained, in so largely giving up its dynamic modes of 
energizing. 

A gas can be more efficient than a solid, unless the solid 
is wielded or in some way engineered by power outside of 
itself. The sun, with its ceaseless giving of free motion, 
is more helpful to us than the rigid moon, which can only 
supply us with a half-worn commodity, at second-hand — 
like a dealer in old clothes. The normal quantity of 
power is still in the moon ; but it is held there in main- 
taining the locked tensions, with their pugilistic type of 
opposed tug and strain. Is it certain, then, that the 
simple integration of matter is a type of evolution ? 

In the living body the co-operations are more or less 
dynamic ; and they are also continuously and progres- 
sively dynamic so long as organization is itself on the 
increase. Its more active tissues are colloids, and the 
growth of these is not a simple addition of a compara- 
tively independent element ; it is an active continuation 
and help to an already efficient process established in the 
interest of the wider co-operations of the organism as a 
whole. The structure itself to which it is added is semi- 
dynamic, and is especially adapted to utilize the still 
freer modes of energy which come to it through every 
pore and through half a dozen specially differentiated 
efficient channels, each of them adapted to a special 
mode of energy of its own. The added growth is added 
dynamic power. 

The efficiency of every living organism certainly de- 
pends upon its integration of motion and its ready disin- 
tegration of tensions, — its rejection of them so soon as 
they are no longer dynamically available. 

We do not know precisely how the tissues manage in 
utilizing free motion. But we have analogies to guide us 
even in the inorganic world. Tensions of the type of the 



ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 29J 

bent bow, which gives out motion in unbending, doubt- 
less play a conspicuous part. Since by help of the senses 
we can penetrate into the mysteries of the living organ- 
ism even less satisfactorily than into the molecular co-op- 
erations of inorganic masses, we must reason largely from 
analogies, and test such hypotheses as seem somewhat 
satisfactorily to suggest possible methods. 

How is it with a molecule of dynamite ? There the 
tensions must be at once in a state of torsion and of 
stress, so held by a congeries of slightly dependent con- 
nections that the giving way anywhere precipitates a flood 
of motion and expansion. The dynamite is an integra- 
tion of matter ; but still more it is an accumulator of 
energy so lightly poised in the duplex tension-strain that 
it is a most effective storehouse of dynamic possibilities. 
Every electrified surface and all " accumulators " of electric 
force hamper this subtle worker of marvels so lightly that 
it is " on tap " at any open door, and may be called off 
either quietly or explosively with the readiest facility. 
Every organism is a much more complicated yet a more 
efficient storehouse of tensions ready at any moment to 
become motions, and to awaken emotions, either in orderly 
transformation or in a more violent explosiveness. Direct 
outside stimulus is not even essential to " automatic " or 
self-acting transformation. Yet on the material side of 
action all dynamic modes must have been earlier brought 
in from the outside world. 

Dr. Foster says : " So essential, in fact, are afferent im- 
pulses to the development of complex bodily movements, 
that we are almost justified in considering every such 
movement in the light of a reflex action made up of 
afferent and efferent impulses and central actions, and set 
going by the influence of some dominent afferent impulse, 
or by the direct action of those nervous changes, whose 
psychical correlative is what we call the will, on the centre 
itself. All day long and every day multitudinous afferent 



298 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

impulses from eye, and ear, and skin, and muscle, and 
other tissues and organs, are streaming into our nervous 
system ; and did each afferent impulse issue as its corre- 
lative efierent motor impulse, our life would be a pro- 
longed convulsion. As it is, by the checks and counter 
checks of cerebral and spinal activities, all these impulses 
are drilled and marshalled and kept in hand in orderly 
array till a movement is called for ; and thus we are able 
to execute at will the most complex bodily manoeuvres, 
knowing only why, and unconscious or but dimly conscious 
how, we carry them out." 1 

The same author says : " The central nerve cells con- 
cerned in reflex actions are to be regarded as constituting 
a sort of molecular machinery, the character of the re- 
sulting movements being determined by the nature of the 
machinery set going and its condition at the time being, 
the character and amount of the afferent impulses de- 
termining exactly what parts of and how far the central 
machinery is thrown into action." 2 

Undoubtedly all the processes of the material body are 
continuously physical from first to last ; yet most of the 
tissues, whether put together by chemical or physical 
modes, are dynamic rather than static in condition, and 
have an unparalleled facility for the absorption of still 
freer motor forces. Yet they are not like dynamite, ready 
to tumble into a cataract of motion, but with a still 
retained freedom of movement, molar or molecular, they 
receive, and transform, and store up energies in a perfectly 
orderly manner, ready to bring them into use in connec- 
tion with any afferent or outside small stimulation which 
may make this desirable. If the large organic molecule, 
with its hundreds of atoms, is largely associated upon 
what we have called the physical plan of compounding, 
the simpler methods of breaking contact would help us in 

1 A Text-Book of Physiology, by M. Foster, M.A., M.D., F.R.S., etc., 
p. 635. 2 P. 131. 



ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 299 

comprehending the nature of the facts so far as they are 
yet ascertained by the very careful physiological investi- 
gations on the part of many most patient observers. 

Then there is much vicarious action of one part in 
behalf of another, especially when any organic disorder 
has arisen. The assumed function is one which benefits 
the organic whole, and is an evidence that something very 
like purpose is directive of all organic process, however 
unconscious it may be to the presiding mind. 

The skin will breathe for the lungs, will absorb food for 
the stomach or for a wounded tissue in its neighborhood; 
it will do something towards taking the work of any one 
of the special senses when that is incapacitated ; it absorbs 
free energy and excretes waste matters for the whole 
organism. It is often difficult to decide which organ is 
the initiating seat of disease and is defaulting in its own 
work, so intimately do all co-operating organs sympathize 
by responsive disturbance of their functions. All organic 
movement is normally movement co-operative towards 
some determinate end, not only where consciousness 
testifies to the carrying out of its purposes, but also when 
consciousness is not subjectively in evidence. 

Division of labor is the origin of every organ ; yet the 
work of each organ tends to the common welfare, whether 
designedly or undesignedly. The constitutional equi- 
librium of all motion, organic as well as inorganic, as sus- 
tainer of all other causes, is the great conservator which 
presides over the increase of organs and functions, and 
also over the initiation of the new individuals of every 
species and variety. The outward symmetry of most 
organisms, plant and animal, is the visible manifestation 
of growth localized by the laws of co-operative physical 
equilibration. For the same reason that the sun is the 
centre, of its solar system, and that a point in the constel- 
lation Hercules is to all appearance the centre of many 
remote solar systems, and for the same reason that a 



300 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

forming crystal, not interfered with by outside operations, 
assumes a maintained symmetry of form, a free organism 
assumes its symmetry of figure. The physical individual 
who acts as the nucleus of that symmetry, it is argued, 
also is the psychical individuality destined to be thereby 
helped to progressive mental development. 

Nature's readjustments are manifold. So fluent are her 
mobile forces that if either of the planets should fall 
bodily into the sun, if any two, coming into collision, 
should then either hang together, or both, broken into 
fragments, should widely scatter in space, every fact indi- 
cates that the solar system would speedily readjust all of 
its associated movements in such ways as to establish a 
new moving equilibrium, in which every planet and every 
detail of every planet would become a modified part and 
parcel of the freshly adapted co-operative whole. The 
resulting changes of modes would vary in kind and 
amount, as more and less remotely and variously modi- 
fied by the supposed catastrophe. But the readjustment 
would literally be universal. 

On a smaller scale, each tangible body must have its 
own leading focus or centre of motion-equilibration — 
usually termed its centre of gravity. The earth's gravita- 
tive centre also is its real but far more mediate centre or 
great node of physical co-operation ; that of the sun, its 
yet more remote focus, and the point in the distant con- 
stellation towards which the solar system, in its aid 
towards universal equilibration, seems to be moving, must 
be the actual centre of balanced motions pertaining to 
the vast system, of which the smallest body, organic or 
inorganic, is a literal if a comparatively infinitesimal part. 

Modifications from immeasurably remote causes may 
be insensible, yet they must be real, whether we regard 
them from the usual point of view taken in formulating 
the law of gravitation or from our present standpoint. 
Motion is equal co-operation, and each phase, whether of 



ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 301 

vibration or translation, tends to travel on in any direc- 
tion towards which it is going — though inevitably reversed 
soon or late, and probably transformed in mode by some 
of its opposing partners ; hence there is some actual work- 
ing relationship between all motions, even between those 
most remote in space. Thus changes in the remotest 
visible star are now producing correlative changes in 
every object upon which its light falls, and this universal 
equilibration governs organic growth. 

The general theory is not only sustained by facts, but 
it is a logical inference from the inherent continuity of 
motor processes. Light and other travelling energies, 
gravitation and translation, are special methods of co- 
operation ; all other methods are equally modifiable by 
each other, are equally the outcome of co-operation, and 
where there are sensible phenomena the influence of the 
co-acting factors is often directly traceable. 

At every point of apparent rest, where impinging wave- 
lets of energy so far neutralize each other that the visible 
action is arrested, the impinging motions come in from at 
least two — they may probably come from many — opposed 
directions. In the rhythmic primary atom we have sup- 
posed that many incoming waves, all in balanced adjust- 
ment, arrest each other at the atomic centre, and from 
there motion is redistributed to the outgoing phases. 

In all varieties of sensible and therefore highly com- 
pound co-operation we find similar resultant nodes of 
motion. Light not only has its nodes of darkness so 
produced, but, as shown by experiment, so do sound, 
heat, electricity ; and every temporarily individualized 
mass has its easily ascertainable centre of gravity, which 
probably is also its great centre of oppositely directed 
but co-operative motions. Every tense cord, when made 
to vibrate, sets up its nodes of apparent rest, from which 
the reversed motion proceeds visibly again in both direc- 
tions. The harmony and the discords in music result 



302 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

either from the smooth co-operations, or from the chop- 
ping interferences of these greater waves of motion. So 
far the theory that the times of these sensible sound waves 
determines their accord or their discord, can be amply 
demonstrated. 

All of these various facts must be attributed to the 
oppositely directed but co-operative, hence to the 
rhythmic or vibratory, character of all primary motion, 
carried on into compounded and into many times com- 
pounded interco-operations with each other. 

These nodes of balanced motion, local in direct co- 
operation, must obtain in all parts of every inorganic body. 
Within the molecule the oppositely directed elements are 
so interlocked, both chemically and physically, that they 
are largely compelled to remain local and restricted in 
vibratory copartnerships. Within a solid body there is 
almost no manifest wider exchange. Upon its surface the 
interaction is demonstrably wider in range, with a wider, 
more complicated rhythm. 

The same principle of balanced co-operation controls 
every organic process. The rhythm is even more mani- 
fest there than elsewhere, since every organ has a modified 
compound rhythm of its own — often sensibly manifest, 
as in the action of lungs and heart. The organic nodes 
which arise from the arrest of motion with more or less 
reversal, which seems only partial because of the complex- 
ity of the phenomena, are very many. They may be 
supposed to have mainly originated the entire mechanism 
of reflex action, and to preside over all of its processes. 
These depend upon the nature and amount of communi- 
cated free motion, as well as upon the reflex mechanism 
and the amount of conveniently stored energy in tension. 

In the plant world, the same equilibrated action is 
dominant. Growth is simultaneously upward and down- 
ward. Branches and leaves are thrown out in a con- 
spicuous symmetry of form. Growth or aggregation, in- 



ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 303 

organic as well as organic, starts from some nucleus, 
shooting out in all available directions in an equipoise 
maintained according to the conditions under which the 
growth arises. The frostwork on a window-pane may be 
as flat as the surface which sustains it, or nearly so ; but 
any structure which raises itself into the air must, as it 
grows, keep itself equilibrated in a three-dimension space. 
This, every crystal and every growing organism uniformly 
does. 

The symmetry may not uniformly be entirely obvious, 
since, like the leaning tower of Pisa, the tree forced into 
lopsidedness can maintain its centre of gravity within its 
base, even when greatly bent over or mutilated. But in- 
variably the added growth, if given fair play, is in the 
direction of a readjusted balance which will involve least 
strain upon the supporting fibres. The bent tree sends up 
its new shoots heavenward and its roots in a direction 
away from the bent stem, that it may get a firmer hold 
within the earth. 

The growth of an organism into the likeness of its kind, 
even to many of the smallest details, has been one of the 
great mysteries of life. The correlation of one physical 
character with another remote in space and wholly unlike 
in special function, yet so obviously interdependent that 
when the one varies the other varies also — as the relation 
between the color of a white cat, the blue color of its 
eyes, and the congenital deafness which accompanies the 
other features, — is even more mysterious. One cannot 
deny that each living thing produces " seed after its kind," 
and that growth of the embryo to maturity is growth 
after its kind. There are those who are sceptical as to 
the genuineness of alleged remote correlations. Mr. Dar- 
win is authority for the statement of the relation between 
the hearing and the color of a cat's fur and eyes ; but I 
know a cat entirely white whose eyes are not blue and she 
is not deaf. One of her children, white, with blue eyes, 



3<D4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

was entirely deaf ; another white one has one blue eye 
and the other of a different color, and the hearing is very 
imperfect. Her other children of different colors hear 
perfectly. One cannot doubt that there is here an exam- 
ple of active obscure correlation. 

But if all matter is motion, and if all motion is com- 
pounded of primary vibrations, since sight and hearing are 
closely allied to light and color and sound, and are indeed 
wholly dependent upon them, it seems less incredible that 
there should be correlated co-operation between these 
physical energies, which in some way inhibits the sensa- 
tion of hearing. It is desirable to fix the attention upon 
the vibratory nature of all equilibrium ; to distinctly 
realize that the balancing movements work in detail or 
individually rather than in masses ; and that at every 
node where antagonized energies are equalized in rest 
there must be both the inflow and the outflow of count- 
less directed lines of free motion as well as the balance 
of tensions. 

The node in a growing plant may be an axis of new 
growth — of the bud, which will develop into branch or 
flower, and which will be evolved into either by providing 
for it the needful conditions. If this node is a position 
where balanced forces have provided a neutral point, from 
which energy may be freely redirected along any path 
which will maintain and strengthen the general equilib- 
rium of the system, then the origin of growth upon its 
physical side becomes fairly intelligible. 

In organic circulation of plant and animal there is both 
the transfer and the utilization of free motion. Various 
crystalline particles move freely, not only in the fluids 
which circulate, but many of them are found readily to 
penetrate the loosely connected tissues and to find a large 
part of the organic substance a domain in which they can 
move about almost as freely as in a vacuum, possibly 
with even more real assistance along their destined on- 



ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 3°5 

ward way. If then one adapted molecule, with a central 
motor node of its own coincident with the atomic node 
of its principal and central atom, so that every molecular 
incoming phase must be redistributed from the heart of 
this leading individuality — if such a small mass should 
find itself located in one of the possible and favorable 
nodes of growth, it would have nothing to do except to 
relate itself actively with its surroundings, availing itself 
of all the help freely brought to it, and to go on from 
there adding to its bodily stature by organic processes 
after the manner of its kind. In this way may begin the 
development of a new, partially detached organism, and a 
real individuality, located in the composite organism, 
and, as we shall see later, destined to no high psychical or 
physical evolution — at least so long as it continues in that 
low order of conditions. 

Whether the new growth — which is in reality a new or- 
gan, of its kind, in formation — shall provide in its turn 
other nodes of growth in symmetrical ranks for the suc- 
cessive branchlets with their successive leaves, or whether 
it shall form the superior node for the new generation of 
seeds — the new individuals which will be cast off to begin 
their growth upon a more independent line, — is only a 
matter of variation in one and the same essential method. 

A leaf is a smaller semi-detached individual organism ; 
its branchlet started from a smaller motor node than the 
parent branch, and the leaf from a node yet smaller and 
more remote perhaps from the main axis of growth ; but 
even within the leaf itself there are yet other nodes from 
which new individuals — organically so considered — might 
take their origin, and in time become the parents of other 
organic hosts of the same type with the original plant. 

Among the " air plants " and some other easily nour- 
ished types new growths from almost any part of a leaf 
can be produced by adapted favoring conditions. But 
these organic individualities must be fully distinguished 



306 the philosophy of individuality. 

in thought from the persisting real individualities — the 
ultimate units which by hypothesis take the central and 
leading places in the axes of growth. A bodily mass, 
whether organic or inorganic, is but a simulated individual 
— one to our sensations, but myriads to the better in- 
structed intelligence. A sheer mechanical necessity will 
soon establish two-sided lateral organization, and, other 
things equal, will distribute growth equally on the two 
sides. But the parental organism is prepotent in direct- 
ing all lines of increase along the paths previously estab- 
lished in its own organization, and literally extended, 
carried forward, within that of its offspring. It is not 
merely that the nutrition is carried over from parent to 
child, but the utilized free forces, with which every 
mature organism so fully works, must move on also into 
the destined new structure. 

When received at a distributing centre which coincides 
with the somatic axis of a dawning sensibility, from a 
continuation of the paths from which it set out, it will be 
redistributed into corresponding places, and applied to 
similar ends. A new organism, whether destined to become 
wholly or only partially separate from the parent, un- 
doubtedly inherits the working tendencies and modes of 
maintaining organic forms and functions to a very influ- 
ential extent. The principles and general methods are 
evident and indisputable, however impossible it still is to 
even suggest the detailed processes. 

The co-ordinated method has been slowly acquired by 
a long line of ancestry. Growth so descended inherits at 
once the materials of growth and their already predeter- 
mined co-ordinations. This is as inevitable as it is that a 
ball without mass motion, struck by another in motion, 
must go forward, driven by the received impulse. The 
organism is started onward as naturally as the ball is ; 
though the impelling forces are many, they all co- 
operate. 



ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 30? 

Among the higher species, the more immediate paren- 
tal modes — inherited still more in detail — are modified 
by a more or less conflicting co-operation from two ances- 
tral sources. 

The compound animal organism approximates in phys- 
ical growth to the methods of the composite plant. Ex- 
cept that it must often search for food instead of absorb- 
ing it almost without effort from earth and air — a search 
initiated from within or without by a felt need, — the 
compound animal buds into new organic individuals from 
the various neutral points established by opposed motions 
in very much the same way that a plant does. These 
buds sometimes break off into free animals, who swim 
about upon their own responsibility, and they sometimes 
continue to adhere and co-operate with the main organism 
— differences closely analogous to that of the branch and 
the free seed. 

When a simple celled plant or animal breaks up into 
two or more separate little organisms, the explanation is 
virtually the same. The several neutral points being 
mechanically produced, and active growth begun in each, 
nutrition is diverted into the new most absorbent tissues, 
and the old connections weaken, very much as a twig once 
vigorous will wither away when a still more vigorous rival 
starts into active growth so situated that it intercepts and 
draws aside the nutrition for its own support. The weak- 
ened connections fall asunder, and the two or more new 
beings grow on, and with animal life, move on, rejoicingly. 

In the phenomena of the " alternate generations," where 
the descendant is not like its parent but like its grand- 
parent, or sometimes like its great-great-grandparent sev- 
eral times removed, these intermediate generations may 
be regarded but as immature growths, like the neuter bee 
which never comes to maturity, or a tadpole state in 
which the conditions are such that the individual never 
reaches maturity, because, with abundant nutriment, new 



308 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

growths are organized ; and in time the parent life is 
sacrificed to that of the offspring. But after a time, as 
with the plant which develops a perfect seed, the new 
perfect organism is evolved. 

It has been noted that every neutral point made favor- 
able to growth has been established by direction-antago- 
nized equal forces, which together produce a point of 
sensible rest. This neutral point within the sustaining 
organism may be compared to the balancing pivot between 
the arms of a lever. At that sustained position, a sym- 
metrical structure if erected would not affect the equal 
balance of the arms of the lever, whether two or many. 
A crystalline tree might form itself from some mineral 
solution upon the pivot of a balance which would dip 
either way with a small additional weight, yet in no way 
disturb the equilibrium of the mechanism. On the same 
principle organic growth, established at a node of oppo- 
sitely directed motion, is in no sense a disturber of the 
organic balance of multiform processes. Each element 
acts for itself in even co-operation with its coworkers in a 
very analogous way in the organic and in the inorganic 
domains. But in an organism there is definite co-opera- 
tion towards a common advantage for each and all, while 
nothing of this kind appears in any unorganized economy. 

As we have every reason to believe that there is no 
direct conscious supervision of any of the nutritive pro- 
cesses whose outcome is organization, and that there is a 
continuous material side to every stage of growth from 
first to last, it becomes important to gain even a possible 
conception of any principle which can at all help us out 
in accounting for the maintained uniformity from genera- 
tion to generation. 

Spencer's " physiological units " and similar already 
formed organic or proximately organic masses, which 
may enter without dissociation into higher organisms, take 
a hypothetic step forward in the right direction. Dar- 



ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 309 

win's pangenesis, interpreted as growth taking its rise from 
minor organic nodes within the system, dividing cells 
and renewing tissues in ways analgous to those already in- 
dicated in the growth of plants and the lower animals, but 
minus the supposed gemmules, would bring all modes of 
organic increase into the same general category. 

All growth, organic and inorganic, as illustrated espe- 
cially in crystal forming and in bilateral organic growth, 
must proceed with a maintained continuous equipoise at 
every stage of every copartnership. But organic growth 
proceeds by the already noted duplex process, which has 
no analogue in the lower, less complex kingdom, — growth 
affected by means of an increase which, in the essential 
nature of it, necessitates a related decrease. It is the 
characteristic process of new node formations, leading to 
the new output of a semi-independent organism. Every 
organic cell and fibre is an organism in a limited sense. 
This fact, in accord with our general hypothesis, we have 
been trying to make both intelligible and credible from 
the new standpoint. 

In inorganic aggregations of all kinds all co-operations 
result from adaptations guided by a rigorous constitu- 
tional necessity for a maintained formal symmetry, with 
the ever active equilibration. But in organization there is 
the added element of an assimilation which compels a 
correlated disassimilation. The one is as much a part of 
organic process as the other. 

We are not now referring to merely rejected and undi- 
gested foods which never enter into the organic cycle, but 
to the purely organization processes found to consist of a 
kind of growth which necessitates a closely correlated 
decay, demonstrably in every part of the organism. Just 
as in the outside world there are near and remote co-op- 
erative relations, so the one co-operative organism is a 
temporary unit of copartnerships of changes all arising 
in a greater and less mutual dependence. Thus the cell 



3IO THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

is a little partially independent organization ; each organ 
is a group of such cells differentiated and related to at- 
tend to special work needful for promoting the highest 
good of the larger corporate body. 

Our position is that the growth which arises with in- 
creased nutrition, supplemented by free oxygen and other 
still more dynamic forces, starting from neutral points, as 
nuclei, so changes the motor directions that the old growths 
are partially broken up as the result. The now waste 
matter being only a hindrance, if possible, must be or- 
ganically eliminated or else in some way reconverted into 
renewed usefulness. 

Add to this the fact that if growth is set up in some 
part of a symmetrical organism, equilibrium requires an 
offset of like growth in a corresponding part of the same 
organism. In general the cell is thus divided into two, 
or four, or sixteen, or is broken up in some way that 
secures a ceaseless balance of action in all directions. 
Upon that system of growth, every part of the organism 
is being continually renewed ; as the leaves are renewed 
from season to season on the tree ; as the sap is organized 
into a new layer of growth according to the hereditary 
methods of its kind. 

The less highly organized leaves and branches find di- 
rective guidance enough in the ordinary plant activity. 
But the blossom with its perfect fruit — to be evolved into 
the higher complexity of the entire tree — is best aided 
by the added sex differentiation co-working with that 
oppositeness of characters generally designated as unlike 
" polarities." This means, as we interpret it, nothing 
more than opposed directions of energizing, which by 
co-operation enable the new being to set out on its long 
path of physiological evolution — of compound organic 
growth — from a higher vantage-ground than would other- 
wise be possible. The tendencies are more complexly 
co-ordinated. 



ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 311 

All complexly organized species and individuals, with 
many complicated, differenced organs, each with its 
special function, are initiated into organic life by the aid 
of distinctively duplicate parental influence. Nature 
nurtures her young under conditions where nutrition is 
abundant and protection is the best available. But it is the 
oppositeness of equalized co-operation which everywhere 
provides for the destined growing structure. The new 
growth is nourished and cherished by prior lives at their 
expense until equipped for a more independent existence. 
It breaks away into independence at parental expense in 
substantially the same way that too young, one-celled 
organisms divide the parent structure — each setting up 
for itself as a new being. 

No new physical method is introduced anywhere, from 
the amoeba up to man. Among higher organisms the pa- 
rent survives because the reproductive function itself has 
become specialized, and can directly bear its own loss ; 
but still, in the growth of new cells upon the old, where 
only the more primary types of organization are required, 
the primary destruction of the parent goes forward with 
no abatement. 

In studying the development of the embryo, it is found 
that the same typical process everywhere obtains. The 
single cell breaks up into the smaller many cells, which 
grow from nutriment presupplied. Wherever organiza- 
tion appears, it is located upon and is evolved out of some 
prior tissue — in part, at least, at the expense of the parent 
substance, which also serves as the medium for the trans- 
mission of nutriment and of free energy. The whole 
living system is the sympathetic matrix for all new organi- 
zation ! Hence the maxim ; no life without a prior life, 
which, in our experience, is as directly true as in a far 
higher sense it must be true absolutely. 

But the reproductive system, legitimately exercised, 
should be in no sense more antagonistic to the general 



312 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

nutrition of the organism than the liver, the kidneys, or 
the brain ; not more so than the legs, the arms, the teeth. 
They are all originated and sustained on the same general 
plan, and so long as they remain parts of one closely 
dependent living equilibrium of endless changes, they are 
sustained from and by the one general fund of growth 
and strength. Nutriment is supplied, and elaborated, and 
circulated equally in the interest of the entire community. 
There is no actual physiological favoritism even in behalf 
of the one dominant individual, as we shall see later. 
They mutually serve and are served ; they all utilize and 
expend energy, but they all justly work for the general 
advantage. 

The new organism should no more be growth at the 
expense of the parent organism than arms and legs should 
be growth at the expense of the trunk or the head of its 
associated organism. Each is the adapted response to the 
evolved organic demand. 

Why should the branches and roots of a tree be con- 
sidered less antagonistic to the central stem and its nutri- 
tion than the buds, the blossoms, and the fruit which it 
customarily produces in a healthful rhythmic balance of 
functions? The leaves are its lungs, as the rootlets are 
its mouths ; its entire structure has been evolved through 
adapted division of labor ; to cut off its legitimate function 
of seed-bearing would be to mutilate its whole organic co- 
ordination of process and compel readjustment to new con- 
ditions. This could only be done at a commensurate loss. 
Its ongoing in organization, instead of continuing a steady 
advance, must call a halt to take up the retrograde work 
of patching and rebalancing, and it must inevitably suffer 
from inability to organize much of its already acquired 
pabulum, which, remaining inorganic, might become a 
clog, a dead-weight, to the entire living system. 

A treatise on Heredity would deal with other phases of 
this subject. Here we are concerned especially with the 



ORGANIZATION ON ITS PHYSICAL SIDE. 3*3 

relations between growth within the organism and growth 
in supplemental organisms, now co-operative, but destined 
to a separate evolution. There is much evidence that, as 
the separation of the young organism is the natural and 
helpful result of normal internal division of labor, pro- 
moted by a maintained co-operative equipose, static and 
dynamic, in connection with the external world, it is pre- 
sumably as much to the advantage of the parent organism 
as of the colonized offspring. 

Every species, as it has developed after its own methods, 
has progressively evolved provisions for reproduction with 
the same obvious structural solicitude for its exercise as 
it has provided a stomach for digestion, limbs for walk- 
ing, and gills or lungs for breathing. In the light of the 
hypothesis that communal feeling, as we define it, evolves 
organism, and is in turn progressively evolved by organi- 
zation, not only this one, but all other often eccentric 
specific provisions can be very fairly accounted for and 
explained in accordance with both physical and psychical 
laws. 

Here, as elsewhere, nature can know nothing of real 
sacrifice. The actual good of the child is the actual good 
of the parent. In her administration action and reaction 
are rigidly equivalent. 

The adapted positions in which growth is readily carried 
onward must be discriminated from the growth itself. 
The positions themselves are positions with, not without, 
contents, and they become actively helpful to the growth 
itself. But while the main co-operation considered hitherto 
has been that of opposed motor forces, in growth proper 
the leading copartnerships in action are between forces 
working in the same directions and towards the same end. 
By hypothesis all organization, all living growths are 
effected chiefly through energies similarly directed, and 
co-operative, more distinctly through methods of physical 
rather than with those of simple chemical aggregation. 



314 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

All motion is directed in some way. The part of feel- 
ing, whether it be nascent, instinctive impulse, or self- 
conscious purpose, is inherently directive. It energizes 
in the interest of its desire, and correlated motion is 
modified and directed accordingly. No mode is trans- 
formed singly, but all modes in groups — those which 
are more nearly connected undergoing most resultant 
modifications. 

Are we told that an arm or any other member is moved 
by muscular contraction ? We answer, undoubtedly ! 
Every physical change is produced by prior physical 
changes ; the part of feeling is to so intervene that 
by changing the directed action of its own soma it can 
modify any entire co-operative group of tensions and free 
motions ; and the final effect may be immeasurably unlike 
any thing which would have resulted without the inter- 
vention of the feeling. Organization is the directed out- 
come of aggregations, which feeling either initiates or, by 
responding to stimulus, emphasizes and directs into 
organic methods of co-operation. Feeling guides the 
process, but motion does the work, and they are but the 
two aspects of one inseparable force. 




THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRON- 
MENT. 

An organism has organic life — that is, it sustains active 
process directed to some common end, towards which 
the energizing is impelled by a shared feeling and mo- 
tion active in one or several of the co-operators. The 
living units work together both on the physical and on 
the psychical plane. It is interatomic co-operation at once 
of feeling and of motion which initiates, sustains, and 
utilizes all organic growth. In a most important sense, 
as we shall see, organic co-partnerships are the extreme 
of inequality in the amounts of individual gain to be 
derived through organization ; but in another and equally 
fundamental sense, in all co-operations the co-acting 
terms are true equivalents. 

In the higher organisms one mind becomes self-con- 
scious, and, so far as we can decide, the others do not ; 
yet by hypothesis it is they who are chiefly concerned in 
the earlier stages of all organization and of all organ- 
forming with division of functions. It is to this rank and 
file, and to their work, to which we call attention in the 
present division of our subject. 

If the individual is a correlation-created unit, through 
which force can be brought into exercise only in accord- 
ance with its inherently established conditions, such an 
individuality must begin its personal life wholly without 
experience. If the power which informs it is living 

315 



316 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

power, it can but remain living, though limited to the con- 
ditions imposed upon the new individuality. Then every 
phase of change in this new being may be an ever new 
transformation of dawning feeling in the potential personal 
sensibility. Whatever arises within its special limitations 
pertains exclusively to itself ; the ever new inherent 
modifications, whether physical or psychical, are its own 
private modes — additional experiences if they are felt, 
additional unrecognized changes if they are not felt. 

The ultimate unit of relative being begins, then, as a 
fully endowed complex of related changes on the physical 
side ; but with no glimmer of experienced, individual 
feeling. We are to endeavor to comprehend how the 
feeling, which is incalculably its highest birthright, may 
be credibly supposed to have arisen. The transition from 
zero to the height of some of the great minds which have 
shed a new and nobler glory over the world itself is im- 
mense, and it must have been a gradual acquirement. 

What have we to guide us in our quest, even in some 
slight degree ? In our experience the most vivid feelings 
accompany the most decided changes from any present 
mode to another quite different. Any condition main- 
tained with but little variation becomes monotonous in 
feeling. A flavor too prolonged palls upon the taste. A 
familiar thing excites but little interest ; it has been 
already experienced. There is an instinct which desires 
to accumulate experience of new varieties ; to add, not 
more of the same, but more of a new kind. As this gain 
can only come with some motor change, other things 
equal, every physical modification which is not harmful is 
helpful, and every increase in harmonious physical co- 
operation is increase also in modifications of feeling. 

In the inorganic world, a nascent mind, we infer, could 
gain almost nothing in feeling if its soma were simply 
repeating its own unmodified rhythm. If such conditions 
should ever arise as would enable it to revive the memory 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 317 

of that period, what could it recall except one monoto- 
nous pulsation of more and less repeated sentience, as its 
physical modes became more and less dynamic. And 
these rhythmic changes, by hypothesis, would not only 
repeat themselves with every cycle, but, as they would be 
differently repeated by each set of alternate vibrators, so 
far as we are able to judge, a potential mind a thousand 
times quicker in future perceptions than we now are, 
could yet experience nothing except one monotony of 
nascent sensibility, though it should continue for ages in 
isolated movement, nor, however much evolved subse- 
quently, could it ever recall more than the same dim 
sensations practically independent of all time. 

Then suppose our mind-matter individual to become 
chemically compounded with others of its kind, or with a 
million heterogeneous elements and compounds, forming 
a large variety of unlike substances, alternating with dis- 
sociations in a long succession covering millions of years, 
what evolution in feeling could it probably have gained 
in all of these countless cycles of time? Certainly very 
little ! In each successive partnership there would be 
dynamic arrest rather than increase, and we must suppose 
that the more active the state, the more quickened the 
accompanying sensibility. Still there would arise nascent 
modifications of feeling ; and we may suppose that, on 
the whole, a low grade of sensibility, with some dawnings 
of difference in it, might, or might not, be evolved, ac- 
cording to the conditions in which any individual hap- 
pened to be placed. 

In most physical co-operations, with more freedom of 
motion there would arise increased sensibility ; yet it is 
only where two lines of motion are similarly directed and 
brought side to side, so that each reinforces the other dy- 
namically, that co-operations in the inorganic world are of 
a character which can be supposed to produce a direct 
increase of sensibility. 



31 8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Free motion is not an individual possession except as 
it is actively retained within the system. Motion in tran- 
sit would awaken adapted sensation in passing through 
the system ; but, as the individuality is never a traveller 
except in connection with its own soma, free motion in 
general can only excite strong feeling when in some way it 
becomes utilized in co-operative processes, in which the 
soma is taking an active share. But are there any pro- 
cesses in unorganized nature which can be regarded as 
distinctively of this class? There all co-operations are 
local except for the share which everything takes in 
gravitation and in the wider ranges of interchanged free 
motion. So far as our knowledge extends this limitation 
is universal. 

In the ordinary distributions of heat, the transfer is by 
conduction from molecule to molecule, and most co-oper- 
ations arise between substances in direct contact, as in 
nearly all chemical alliances. In electrification, the elec- 
trified particles are either in electric tension, which is a 
static or non-sensitive condition, or if part of a closed cir- 
cuit the transfer is in rapid flashes which have no distinc- 
tive character and can be supposed to awaken nothing 
more than mere sensation. Provided we accept the theory 
that feeling is the sensitive aspect of motion, can we point 
to any one mode of inorganic movement which can be 
rationally supposed to awaken any other response than 
that of an undiscriminated, instinctive desire for more? 

Under all normal conditions the stir of nascent feeling 
is presumably pleasant rather than painful, so that the 
slightest beginning of personal sensibility would naturally 
be a groping inclination for a repetition of the same. The 
fact, also, that all change is successive, would confirm 
that tendency. Thus it seems reasonable to assume that 
the first dawnings of feeling would be an almost undiffer- 
entiated craving for more feeling, for the enjoyment of 
more sensibility, however vague its beginnings. 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 319 

Motions of translation, such as the revolutions of the 
planets, probably can do almost or quite nothing towards 
the evolution of personal sentience, since, the environ- 
ment of each particle sharing in the same movement, 
there can be no sensible contrast and nothing either inter- 
nal or external which would tend to excite sensation. It 
is as when we ourselves are moving in calm waters with 
the moving ship, yet have no sensations of movement. 
Or better still is the fact that though we are rapidly 
wheeling around the sun with the earth, yet, so far as sen- 
sation goes, we remain entirely unconscious of the motion. 

The condition of mere feeling, without reflection or 
discrimination, is not yet mind — which is essentially a 
comparison of this to that. And yet, so far as it goes, it 
must be rudimentary mind, with a dim sense of difference 
between a more and less of sensibility. Possibly there 
may arise the vague consciousness that a past feeling 
is not present. At any rate the first elements of experi- 
ence would be the instinct to gain the agreeable some- 
thing there at one moment and gone the next, so that its 
first desire and its first effort would be in that direction. 

Then is there any good reason why if any group of mol- 
ecules in which the individuals have attained to this sen- 
sitive condition are brought into the needful co-operation 
they should not energize together in the manner and in 
the direction which would bring increase of feeling ? Such 
co-operation would mean associated action towards a com- 
mon end. It would be the beginning of organic process, 
as distinguished from inorganic process. And why organ- 
ization of this lowest type may not to-day arise directly 
from the inorganic, as it must have done originally, it 
would be impossible to say. 

But the adapted and customary place of nurture is the 
parent organism with its directing helpfulness. Then the 
energizing with a common interest like the ongoing of any 
two or many wavelets which support and uphold each 



320 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

other, is an actual increase of dynamic or emotion-quick- 
ening activity. Thus the added sensibility is the imme- 
diate reward as well as the inciting stimulus. This shared 
interest is the beginning of associated, feeling-directed 
process. 

But organization requires more than associated move- 
ment. It means the taking in of other elements which 
can still increase the advantage. It means growth by 
the incorporation of new helpers, and it means also the 
pushing out of such as can no longer promote the com- 
mon interest — the merely mechanical conditions being 
everywhere largely assistive. The maintained equipoise 
at every stage is a constant check to the feeling, as an 
adapted amount of weight steadies a rising balloon, but 
the feeling continues to be the impelling onward push. 

The nature and co-operation of the food-supply must 
always largely affect the form and the amount of 
growth on the one hand, and the parental, inherited ten- 
dencies on the other. Both are directive in their several 
ways, and as the nature and outcome of all physical co- 
operation is so entirely dependent upon the directions of 
the several energies, these are both most important fac- 
tors. The part of the organic co-operation itself is to so 
adapt its internal processes to these outside helpers as to 
make the new organic outcome a steady increase both 
physically and psychically. And in the beginning of all 
new organisms this must be effected, not consciously, but 
instinctively. We, looking on from the outside and try- 
ing to gain some skill in interpreting the facts from our 
own experience, from the testimony of others, and from 
our observations of them in their higher manifestations, 
must try to imagine the methods which mark the begin- 
nings of conjoined physical and psychical development. 
It began in the past, but it continues in unabated progress 
in plants, in the lower animals, and in every human 
infant. 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT, 32 1 

An amoeba, almost an unorganized mass of protoplasm, 
moves apparently with or without external stimulation, 
evidently in search of something ; and when it touches a 
food-supply will flow around it, shutting it into a tempo- 
rary stomach, then assimilating whatever is suited to itself 
it will flow back, leaving the undigested remainder. 
Here is organic process as near the beginning as we can 
hope to recognize it, and yet as complete in its simple 
cycle of typical process as any of the more complex 
organisms ! We know that this repeated seeking move- 
ment of a sensible part of the mass must involve the 
community change of many associated individuals, all 
directed one way and seemingly toward one end, as if 
actuated by a common impulse. What more reasonable, 
then, than the supposition that a nascent desire for in- 
creased sensation, internally or externally excited, does 
move the small extemporized member towards its gratifi- 
cation on much the same principle as that which moves 
an army of men in search of rations ? 

It is a mass movement, because the units are all com- 
pounded into a united whole and must move in groups if 
they move visibly at all. There is a real mechanical side 
to it, for one part of the amoeba evidently acts as 
a fulcrum or support to the moving part ; and that the 
dominant incentive, the directive impulse, is a real hun- 
ger, is shown by the appropriation and the organization 
of food. 

To merely assert that molar motion is a property of 
protoplasm without showing how such an unusual property 
can be thought to have arisen, can amount to very little. 
We know that mass-motion never arises in the inorganic 
world unless some prior motion is so directed as to impel 
forward the body moved by impact. We also know that 
in our own case we can move the head, an arm, a finger, 
at will, but that, as a mass movement, from first to last 
the motion is exclusively mechanical, and that we can 



322 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

only move one member by the help of others which act 
in opposition to it. The volition is but the directive side 
of the physical change in our own case. Why not, then, 
in that of the amoeba and of all other protoplasm ? 

The only difference in the two methods is that in the 
movement of my arm it is my desire which directs the 
entire movement. But in the outreach of the amoeba 
mass with its many individuals, all manifestly of about 
one grade, the directive feeling must be an instinct, shared 
by the multitude to a sufficient extent to guide the move- 
ment, somewhat gropingly in one general direction. 

But every ring of school children holding hands at play 
is moved by the same shared impulse. And, as we shall 
find grounds for assuming later on, nearly all of the 
nutritive functions of even the higher organisms are car- 
ried forward in the same way — by the co-operative direc- 
tion of the general commonwealth. The impulse to pull 
together being always stimulated by the directly result- 
ing increase of feeling, so long as the physical and psychi- 
cal factors can work together to a common end, advan- 
tageous to the whole organism, the stimulus is all in that 
direction. And action, diverted to a common end by 
feeling, whether that of an individual or of many co- 
working individuals, is exactly the principal feature which 
distinguishes all organic processes from all inorganic 
processes, except such as have also been brought under 
the guiding control of mind, as in the working of all 
machinery. Most social work is of this kind. 

It is well known that all machines are both constructed 
and worked under the direction of mind ; yet we often 
talk of reflex action within the organism and of the 
operations of machinery as though both were purely 
mechanical. Our claim is that the organic self-operating 
mechanisms, like all other machines, are structurally 
evolved under the directive guidance of feeling, which is 
either instinctive or intelligent and self-conscious, and 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 323 

although, like other mechanisms, the sections of a spinal 
cord may respond to any appropriate stimulus, yet 
without the frequent intervention of a sentient guidance 
the whole would speedily fall into hopeless confusion. It 
is feeling which by its directive economy either stores up 
availably or immediately supplies the needed energy for 
maintaining the reflex activities. 

This also is as true in the operation as in the manufac- 
ture of all mechanisms constructed and run by human 
ingenuity. Perpetual motion is impossible in any process 
which is progressive or ongoing in its character, as all 
sentiently directed action is when not accompanied by 
immediately equivalent rhythmic reversal of vibrations. 
Whether a co-operative equivalence of this exclusively 
static type could arise anywhere except in an entirely 
isolated primary atom, is questionable. So far as we 
know, such unshared action and reaction nowhere co- 
operate without some outside correspondence. 

As it is mind which provides for the winding of the 
clock, and mind which must indirectly produce and adapt 
the steam for propelling the engine, so it is mind, spon- 
taneous or voluntary in its directiveness, which, by divert- 
ing energy to that end, must act as provider of free 
motion, of dynamic power, to be used in the furtherance 
of organization and of all organic functions. Without the 
intervention of feeling we hold that not even Natural 
Selection could either originate organization or could 
advance any organism to a higher level than that of its 
predecessors. The survival of the fittest is an admitted 
general fact ; but back of that is the feeling which has 
evolved the organically fittest with its specific part in the 
upbuilding co-operations, which remains to be more fully 
accounted for. 

No small increments of matter can engineer themselves 
into structural advancement unless matter is one thing in 
the inorganic domain and quite another in the organic. 



324 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

In the one it knows nothing of advance, and can only give 
and take in perfect but static equity, which leads nowhere in 
particular, but is eternally its own slightly variable equiva- 
lent. In the other it is always working in the interest of 
some organic advantage. Since we know that in many of 
the higher organic functions mind is the true and only 
directive principle and that in some way it is able to 
guide physical processes to suit itself, it is fair to assume 
that some parallel sentient direction presides over all 
organization, and is the essential factor in all organic 
co-operations. 

It is of no consequence whether one or a dozen indi- 
viduals have been concerned in the planning and con- 
structing and providing the working energy for a machine, 
and in holding it properly directed towards the accom- 
plishment of some desired object. But as the object and 
the method are both things which can only be appreciated 
by some kind of sensibility, it is positively essential that 
the sensibility which desires the accomplishment shall be 
the impelling impulse towards its accomplishment. It 
secures the power. 

We will assume, then, that feeling of some kind pre- 
sides over or gives a continuous tendency towards all 
organization, and is directly or indirectly concerned in all 
organic co-operations. 

But the mental powers of embryo minds in the begin- 
ning of organic life are not intelligent enough to direct 
anything consciously or voluntarily. We must then 
assign the needed impulse towards some common gratifi- 
cation to the entire rank and file, who, being in about the 
same conditions, may be supposed to share a common 
feeling and to move together towards its gratification. It 
certainly is not extravagant to assume that during untold 
ages, with their many probable opportunities for inter- 
atomic copartnerships of greatly differenced kinds, the 
accompanying sentient experience may have reached the 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 325 

stage of a nascent instinctive desire for more ! more ! 
And possibly it vaguely feels, what is undoubtedly true, 
that this more can come to it only through its active 
co-operation with others, and in the direction of the same 
common interest. 

At any rate, all co-operation, when so directed, carries 
the gratification in the process itself ; so that the physical 
either seconds the psychical, or, acting as initiator, it 
evolves it as a constitutional result, and doubtless both 
impelling causes may go hand in hand. As certainly as 
any two coinciding waves of light produce increase of 
brilliancy ; as any two coinciding forces increase each 
other's motion by helping each other in the overcoming 
of opposing forces, so certainly, if feeling is the other and 
living aspect of motion, must co-operation jointly directed 
towards one object increase both the physical and the 
psychical dynamic energizing. 

We may remark here that dynamic forces are often 
called the living forces even by those who do not asso- 
ciate living experiences with the " living " or actively ex- 
ecutive physical modes. We distinctly do so associate 
them, and we relate the sleep of the mind, the rest of 
active consciousness, with that sleep of the tensions which 
comes from co-operative opposed motions. 

Feeling of the co-operation-seeking type, the nascent 
desire or hunger, may be of several varieties ; as hunger 
for food, for the assimilation and resulting co-operation 
with such food. The one would impel to a search for the 
adapted supply, the other to organization proper. A 
little more specialized, the hunger might originate respira- 
tion by finding the gratification of the feeling from co- 
operation with oxygen, and the satisfaction from instinc- 
tively avoiding the inconveniences of waste matter — 
eliminated by the help of oxygen. Remember that billions 
of units may be more or less successfully working to- 
gether, guided blindly by the feeling of sentient increase, 



326 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

and that numbers of these are successively brought into 
the copartnership, and helped out again as the felt 
exigencies of the situation require. The majority here 
would rule. 

The personal feeling modifies the movements of its own 
soma, and as many others are similarly modified by their 
sensibilities, the like modes in like conditions are enabled 
harmoniously to support each other, to move in the direc- 
tion of the general impulse, of the general need, and to 
move together — that is, to establish molar motion. Co- 
operatively, they waveringly seek, find, and appropriate 
food. When the structural state is only that of an 
apparently unorganized, jelly-like, transparent mass — 
" organized water" some one christened it, — its associate 
life has become visibly manifested in this sensible mass or 
molar motion. 

If the living mass is evolved by the help of a distinctly 
parent organism, the food supply is transmitted to it by 
the parental intervention ; but the organizing process goes 
on internally all the same. Governed by the mechanical 
exigencies of the situation, the elaboration of the material 
and the elimination of the non-suitable and the no longer 
available would be directed by sensations excited as re- 
actions from these conditions. In this way the double- 
sided, mental and material, method of organic process 
would become established with increasingly active cor- 
relations. 

All food and all other stimulus must be appropriated 
and organized by continuous physical process. Force is 
expended that is transformed from dynamic to more static 
conditions, or to non-available dynamic ones, at every 
stage of organic action. The motion jointly put forth in 
seeking for nutriment and bringing it into the federation 
is free motion exchanged for tension ; and, so far as or- 
ganization involves chemical association, there also is in- 
crease of tension. But tension, unless it is a good utilizer 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 327 

of freer modes, or can in some mechanical way serve the 
general organic advantage, becomes a cumberer in the 
active organic field. The most dimly aroused sentient 
impulse must be to push it out of the way. Thus, even 
nascent sensation would be directive both as initiating stim- 
ulus and as response a?id reaction from resulting conditions, 
whether organic or extra-organic. 

The organized nutriment (we include both food and 
other absorbed energy, as inhaled oxygen, absorbed heat, 
light, etc.) becomes the source of increased organic power. 
Energy is expended in part in still enlarging and adapt- 
ing the system to growing sentient needs, but in larger 
part in keeping the organism in a good working condition. 
Hence the gradual evolution of respiration, and the cir- 
culation of fluids, which act as carriers of nutriment, of 
harmful residues, and of secretions. 

Necessarily, the great desideration becomes an access 
of the most dynamic helpers which can be secured. The 
great want is met from the beginning in part by a 
rudimentary mode of breathing from all surfaces — a habit 
still retained very largely by the skin. The oxygen, first 
organized, is subsequently eliminated through chemical 
combination, and exhaled from the system as carbon 
dioxide, and is thus useful both in coming and in going. 

The special senses owe their progressive formation to 
the same need for adapted, helping, dynamic modes of 
energy. Beginning, each of them in the most rudimentary 
direct co-operation with adapted vibrators in direct con- 
tact, the sense-organs of sight, hearing, etc., have been 
gradually evolved. Each became the supply to a special 
need ; but they all contribute dynamic force, utilized 
demonstrably in the interest of the organism as a whole. 

The accompanying modified feeling evolved in and 
through the modified need and its supply would be as 
inevitable as the first undifferentiated hunger — desire for 
more secured by co-operation of the most primary type. 



328 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

Respiration in all stages of development, so far as it is 
attended by conscious feeling, is in response to an organic 
need. Being, to a very limited extent, subject to volun- 
tary control, it is controlled by nascent co-operative feel- 
ing. There is no parallel process in the non-organic world. 
No inorganic body habitually renews itself by absorbing 
certain adapted elements, using them for its own purposes, 
and then promptly dissociating them as waste products. 

The absorption and radiation of heat and other active 
vibrations by inorganic bodies and the more rapid trans- 
mission of radiating energy are nearest akin to organic 
breathing economies ; but the processes are fundamentally 
dissimilar. The migrating energy is itself the initiative 
force in inorganic process ; it moves into the receiving 
body by an already acquired motor impulse, but the 
in-breathing organism initiates every inspiration and it 
produces every expiration ; it finds its supply from with- 
out, but from that moment the entire co-operative pro- 
cess is an organic specialty ; and in pouring back the no 
longer useful elements into the great inorganic environ- 
ment, burdened and lowered in dynamic modes, it has 
acquired for itself a dynamic service which the inorganic 
methods have nothing of and which nothing in their modes 
can enable them to acquire unaided. 

Now if we concede that feeling, already growingly 
active in each unit of the growing organism, would readily 
become modified in response to the new active need ; 
and would go out in associated motion of a modified 
kind, absorbing the ready atmospheric help and utilizing 
that also, such advance in modes of feeling and in corre- 
sponding modes of doing would be entirely in accordance 
with all analogies. The common feeling, initiating, work- 
ing in and with molar appropriate motion, would steadily 
if slowly evolve both structure and function respiratory 
in utility. It would also evolve these breathing organs 
not de novo, but from such material as could be found 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 329 

available under such conditions as limit both the organ- 
ism and its inorganic supplies. 

In the water, the breathing structure, beginning over 
the whole surface, would in time evolve specialized and 
more efficient gills ; in amphibia, both gills and lungs ; and 
air breathers, lungs only. No one can doubt the wonderful 
but sure moulding of organic forms, organs, and all of 
the details of structure by means of sentient habits and 
feelings. Feeling is developed with and by modified 
motion ; and motion is modified in turn both by feeling 
and by its motor partnerships. Thus environment, near 
and remote, will necessarily lay its shaping pressure more 
and less heavily on every side. Environment extends its 
active co-operations to every part of every growing organ- 
ism, and so far as each soma responds to its modifying 
effects, so far must a responsive feeling of a modified kind 
be awakened in any co-operating mind. 

By hypothesis the modified feelings arise in rigid cor- 
relation with the modified motions. The correlations are 
not the less efficient because they compel adapted changes 
in two aspects of one and the same thing, than correlations 
habitually are when they compel commensurate changes 
in ttvo correlated things. 

As new organic needs slowly emerge — from the neces- 
sities of the case — in a growing organism, the evolved 
feeling instinctively points the way to the adapted supply. 
Each soma mediates between its individual sensibility and 
the environment ; and as like external causes evolve 
like feelings, the resultant molar movement is co-opera- 
tively directed and is thus held along the lines of a com- 
munity interest. But as the needs become various, so do 
the responsive individual feelings. Differentiation of modes 
gradually arises in the modified energies. The associated 
feelings which have kept the lead in every phase of develop- 
ment unconsciously thus point the way, not only of all 
growth but also they severally point the way towards all 



330 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

differentiation in growth — that is, towards the evolution 
of organs and their structural adaptations, to the advan- 
tage of the organic whole. The co-operative, but as we 
maintain, the always individual feeling, must become 
differenced even in the same organ and still more in 
organs which have acquired widely different functions. 
If in every movement of the living arm the particles 
swing at different rates through different spaces, and if 
feeling is the living sensibility in active modes of motion, 
individual feeling whatever it may amount to in such 
associated motion would be dimly differentiated even 
here. How much more then in the rhythmic self-opera- 
ting pulsations of lungs and heart, of arteries and veins 
and valves and nerves and muscles ? 

But here we approach the new complications which arise 
when one directive mind has become enough evolved, by 
virtue of its superior position in the vital system, to use 
it in various ways primarily for its own personal advan- 
tage. Even then the atoms, built together into any organ 
and moved at the will of another, lose nothing in sentience 
by their subserviency. They gain rather, as we gain by 
putting ourselves under the control of a steam-engine and 
the engineer, to be whirled across country in a railroad 
car. We lose nothing of our own powers, but, keeping all 
that we have, we avail ourselves of the wonderful services 
of foreign potentialities. We do this guided by intelligent 
volition. The vaguely sentient organic atom does the 
same thing in a lesser degree by helping to build itself into 
organic co-operation, by allying its desires to the like desires 
of its co-laborers. If the living feeling did not guide bodily 
movement in both cases, no progressive movement could 
result ; but sooner or later the action would return upon 
itself with no actual gain. 

There may be a faint sense of change to every atom in 
the swinging shaft and the revolving wheel. In the varied 
motions of a living arm, that kind of sensation, sensation 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 33 1 

enforced from without — somewhat like our sensations 
when a tree or a leaf forces itself upon our attention by- 
sending out energy to us in the line of the open eye, — that 
kind of outwardly stimulated sensation must be accumu- 
lating in the vague experience of each unorganized and 
still more in each organized being, very much as sensa- 
tions of forms and colors accumulate independent of our 
volition in almost infinite series of simultaneous and 
successive so-called " impressions." In that class of 
repeated sensations there is but little gain. 

Of course we can only lamely reason here by inference 
from analogies. Beginning with the fundamental postu- 
late that feeling, the living side of motion, is vivid in 
proportion to the free co-operative scope of its atomic 
vibrations and varied as they vary in kind, and that it 
sinks into the background towards insentience when 
atomic motion is fettered by opposing motion, we shall 
be forced to the conclusion that the rank and file of even 
the highest organism, although they are the efficient 
organizers of living structure, have as yet attained to but a 
very low sentient estate. What chance has been given 
for more than this ? 

An atom in any special organ can only directly help 
forward the special work of that organ. While it remains 
organized therefore, it is condemned to monotonous repe- 
tition of similar phases — varying in intensity, as, to a greater 
or less extent, reinforced by traversing free energies and 
affected by organic variations of condition and action in 
general. But, presumably, it does not remain where it 
is, nor as it is, for any considerable period of the organic 
life. Elaborated, let us say, by the digestive system, 
impelled into the circulation as a part of a red corpuscle 
in the blood, taken up and statically adopted into some 
tissue, its time of remaining a working member of any 
living cell, though unknown and probably varying with 
the sort of cell into which it is incorporated, is inferred 



332 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

by all physiologists to be but brief at the farthest. Then 
it is deorganized — perhaps by successive stages of letting 
down again into the inorganic state. At any rate it sooner 
or later either drifts out of the system or remains in some 
cranny with its helpless confreres, an incubus now, doing 
the living structure, possibly, as much disservice as it for- 
merly rendered it service. 

The organic history of such an atom, varying it as we 
may by assigning to it differenced functions and corre- 
sponding differences of awakened increasing feeling, is of 
necessity meagre in amount as measured by time, and low 
in the quality of its sensibility. Yet such an Ego has 
probably made a distinct gain in feeling by ascending into 
the more dynamic world. There is much probability that 
it drifts from one organism in a state to be readily taken 
up by another, as when exhaled in a molecule of carbon- 
dioxide it becomes food for a growing plant ; it may 
evolve a long rhythmic inchoate experience, acquired 
through repeatedly ascending or descending organic rela- 
tions which enable it to enjoy now more now less vivid 
and varied sensations. 

Nothing like conscious mind, intelligence, knowledge, 
deliberated purpose, can be supposed to enter into the 
life history of any of this rank and file of individualities 
successively becoming helpful organic constituents. 
They are organized very much as previously they became 
inorganic constituents. Though without their directive 
and community feeling, organic growth could no more 
receive guidance toward a common advantage than 
mechanical growth alone can confer actual gain upon a 
growing crystal ; yet what opportunity has one of these 
nascent minds to gain any other sentient development 
during its organic transit than that of simple instinctive, 
blind feeling? 

Perhaps it is better so ! There is no room for discon- 
tent, none for disappointment, no fear, and no stirring 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 333 

of desire which is not promptly satisfied. It moves on 
towards its own destiny. When the valuable assistance 
which it is able to contribute to the organic total has 
reached its co-operative limit, what next ? Possibly very 
little sentient gain. 

It may be supposed that some exception to this dis- 
couraging statement can be found in the nervous system, 
since every ganglion has its own incoming and outgoing 
fibres and can control an adapted nerve current in its own 
way. Some suppose real consciousness to preside there. 

We can only point out the great difference between 
reflex action, between any form of reaction or of automatic 
action on the part of an already established mechanism 
and the deliberate going out in search of the pabulum 
which is subsequently built up into the structure of that 
mechanism. Any machine can automatically do the work 
for which it has been fitted, provided it is steadily sup- 
plied with the needful working energy ; but no inorganic 
machine can fashion and upbuild itself. 

Just as thought and purpose and the bringing together 
of materials must precede the construction of the machine 
proper, so the low form of desire which impels to co-op- 
eration must precede the systematic going out in search 
of the material which is subsequently organized. The 
mechanical act of compounding may be achieved precisely 
as it would be if the mechanism were inorganic. The 
material side of every living substance puts itself together 
and operates itself from atomic vibratory centres accord- 
ing to the same law of the composition of forces which 
controls all physical processes. There is no break in the 
material continuity of action and no fundamental change 
of method. We only assert that just as there is nothing 
in quantitative law which can originate the ideal co-ordi- 
nations that together constitute the plan, the mental 
scheme of the machine, so there is nothing in quantitative 
law which can explain the co-operative going out of any 



334 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

organic part in search of food or any other needed supply. 
In our conscious state we make searches of this kind only 
in response to some impelling feeling— though the actual 
search is made by purely physical means and upon an ab- 
solutely physical basis. 

It is the quest for something which may be at a dis- 
tance, not the acceptance of something in contact, which 
must be accounted for by the intervention of feeling. 
Thus a nervous system, once in working order, can re- 
spond reflexly to any stimulus perhaps as well without as 
with feeling. In our own experience it sometimes does 
so with and sometimes without personal consciousness, at 
least of that kind to which we attend. 

The system may adopt the nutriment brought to it in- 
dependent of its own intervention, without being impelled 
to this by the stimulus of feeling, in the same way that any 
substance unites with another by chemical or physical 
compounding or a combination of both methods. The 
aroused feeling in such co-operations would be that of in- 
organic synthesis — feeling attending initiated motion in 
distinction from motion which attends initial feeling. 
Both kinds of change freely arise in the multiplicity of 
local streams of process, and local changes must occur at 
every point of the growing system helping on the various 
renewals which attend all recuperation. 

It often is difficult to decide between the two classes, 
but with a structure of tensions already established, how- 
ever slight the bonds by which they are united, with the 
circulatory system in vigorous attendance — excepting the 
motor structures — the special organs have no seeking for 
nutriment. Each portion is bathed in nutritive fluids, 
composed of nearly free dynamic modes, and has only to 
reinforce itself according to its needs. The superior 
nervous system and other organs not directly con- 
cerned with the nutritive, circulatory, and respiratory 
functions may do their own proper work without concern 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 335 

about where the supplies are coming from, or why and 
how they have been adapted to their special needs. The 
vasso-motor system does something towards regulating 
nutritive supplies for organs, tissues, fibres, and cells, but 
largely the work of all connecting nerves is that of trans- 
mitting special energies adapted to do special modes of 
work, as light and sound in some way promote sight and 
hearing ; and free motion, carried to the muscles, is trans- 
formed into molar motion. These nerve transferences 
are conducted by molecular processes as distinguished 
from all sensible or mass movements. 
• The energies and their methods of ongoing are greatly 
modified within the organism though starting on their 
journey with preparation for the work to be done at the 
end of their organic route. The nutritive system is 
structurally and dynamically differentiated from the 
nervous system, though feeling must mediately direct 
all functions. 

We include in the nutritive system not only those 
organs concerned with deglutition, digestion, circulation, 
and inhalation, but prehensile organs exercised in the pro- 
curing of food and the entire muscular system, which by 
its movements assists in the work of obtaining nutriment 
in the animal world, and the corresponding organs in the 
vegetable kingdom, which, in their degree, work after 
what are essentially the same class of differentiating 
methods. Many of these organs have a much wider 
work to perform than that of furnishing materials for in- 
creased organization, though that must have been their 
primary vocation. With the evolution of structure is 
always evolved, with equal step, the evolution of func- 
tion, and vice versa. The function is the dynamic 
utilization of the structure ; hence it increases and multi- 
plies its specialties of work in all higher organisms 
directed by the nascent or by the broadening conscious 
sensibility. 



336 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

The substances with which the nutritive system is oc- 
cupied are largely tensions — such tensions as are readily 
transformed to free energy. It is exclusively tensions 
and their alternating dynamic modes which become not 
very permanently organized. The travelling free modes, 
as heat and light and sound, have no individuality. 
They are only modes of energy taken up by one and another 
atom or molecule or mass, enabling it to do some special 
work which its former modes were incompetent to 
achieve. 

The vast difference between organic and inorganic pro- 
cess lies not alone in the great fact that in the organism 
there is everywhere coworking guidance, it is also that 
the whole economy is adapted specially to the absorption 
and utilization of free motion, — which at once causes the 
evolution of feeling and the evolution of the mechanism 
through which the acquired feeling can best secure effec- 
tive work. 

The connecting nerves transfer energy from the organs 
of sense to nerve ganglia, and from there motor nerves 
convey the same or a transformed energy to the muscles. 
They are all only the carriers of free motion. The energy 
itself is ready to help in any way or place with its force- 
ful dynamic activity. 

The method of energy transfer by the nervous system 
is more of the inorganic than of the organic type. It 
varies in general function in the afferent and efferent 
nerves and presumably in the different nerves of special 
sense ; nor is there probably any inorganic mode of radia- 
tion or conduction to which it is closely similar ; yet it 
belongs to the same class with them all, and must be as 
purely mechanical in the one case as in the others. Also 
the sensibility, excited by the passage of the free energy, 
and by any somatic co-operation with it, can be supposed 
to differ successively only as more and less, and to be as 
purely of the repeatative and merely sensation type as 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 337 

the sensibility awakened in an atom of ether in its trans- 
fer of dynamic power from the sun. 

Neither is there anything in the redistribution of 
energy, with or without transformation by the various 
nerve centres, which seems to be radically unlike similar 
phenomena inorganically redistributed. The amount of 
the received mode generally determines the directions 
and the extent to which it is reflected into the motor 
nerves and on to the muscles which are set in motion, 
more or less, accordingly, when not otherwise reinforced. 

The motive effects are indeed often much greater than 
the amount of motion which set them into action ; but 
this must mean that energy, accumulated in some form 
of easily released tension, is set free and added to the 
initial force. It is known that all muscular movement is 
accompanied by small explosions which release free 
motion of some kind en route ; and the local nerve centres 
are found to produce similar effects of energy-reinforce- 
ment, undoubtedly accomplished in some closely parallel 
way by either chemical or physical release. 

Electrical accumulators release motion from torsion, 
and so do most tensions which have been produced by 
physical rather than by chemical methods. The strains 
in the dielectric can be made to reinforce an electric 
current, and all magneto-electric co-operation is very much 
of that character. All discharge of static electrification 
is the simple release of a powerful form of dynamic force 
before held in check. So probably, in part, is the energy 
of discharged dynamite and of all of its kindred ; and the 
simple but forceful spring of the bent bow belongs to the 
same genus. Organic dissociation is certainly largely of 
this kind of release from some simple state of constraint. 

In dynamite there is the accompanying change of state 
from a solid to the gaseous form, with its immense 
expansion in the direction of propagation — a very 
common mode of impelling force. The transformation 



338 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

of foods into organic heat can be best explained as in 
part chemical dissociation and in part as the change from 
the tension of solids to the freer motions of fluids and 
gases — a transformation perhaps carried on by several 
stages of co-operation, as facts and analogies lead us to 
infer. 

Most of the organic co-operations, like most if not all 
those of the nervous system, have functions which are 
more inorganic than organic in method. In the division 
of labor, this has become the result by the same principle 
of economy which provides nutrition for the entire 
organism as the special work of the digestive and cir- 
culatory systems. There are the usual two methods of 
transfer : the one, some form of mass translation ; the 
other, of forwarded free motion. 

The important features of the case are : what things 
are transferred ? and, what are they transferred to ? 
because every organized unit which becomes physically a 
recipient is also mentally a recipient. The nutrition 
received by all, not only invigorates dynamically, but it 
should quicken sensibility proportionately ; and to this 
extent, each of the rank and file must gain individually. 
But by hypothesis, the special senses directly communicate 
only with the one conscious and dominant mind of a higher 
organism; and, under normal conditions, the whole 
motor system does nothing, or not much, besides carry- 
ing out its special behests, either directly or indirectly. 
In accordance both with its interests and desires, the 
whole organism is also indirectly benefited however. 

The general nervous and muscular systems arise through 
heredity only in connection with the evolution of a mind 
which will direct them for its own personal ends. At 
the earlier stages, possibly throughout, a mind-copartner- 
ship of need and desire becomes the blind directive 
energy for the community — so far as molar motion is 
concerned. 



THE NASCENT MIND AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 339 

The differentiated mechanism becomes increasingly 
effective. At the local stations, free motion in transit is 
shunted off upon one or several side tracks where it is 
available in the interest of the greatest utility — sent on 
to wherever it can be best transmuted either into help- 
fulness or harmlessness. From this class of phenomena 
it is gravely concluded by some reasoners that the 
ganglia of the spinal cords are the little brains where the 
inferior intelligences of the organism have their respec- 
tive seats of consciousness. 

A species of individuality is often attributed to such a 
nerve centre with its connected nerve fibres. Doubtless 
it is individual in about the same sense in which any 
definite structure, a rock, a bar of iron, a tree, a horse, or 
any other partially isolated mass, inorganic or organic, 
may be regarded as individual. It is far more closely 
co-operative in many ways within its own boundaries 
than with anything outside of itself. Each ganglion and 
its special circuit of nerves is like a way station with its 
local and side tracks — in one sense a system by itself ; in 
another, part of a very much larger railway connection. 
But such a station must be estimated by the positive 
work which it does, not by the goods which it merely 
turns back or sends forward along some branch road to 
be used elsewhere. That is inorganic method. 

The true individual can be nothing really distinctive if 
it be not as indivisible as the related terms which con- 
dition a changeless unity. By hypothesis, every organism 
is composed of countless multitudes of such indivisible 
units, each with a potential personal sensibility, possibly, 
of limitless capacities. But it is absolutely dependent 
upon the co-operative opportunities, which can come to 
it only through others, for the whole of its sentient 
development. In the beginning of its estate, it has no 
personal power or knowledge which can enable it to help 
itself to a possible evolution. There is no known process 



340 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

in inorganic co-partnerships which can be supposed 
greatly to advance its sensible experiences. And when it 
comes into the organism, its condition, if our reasoning is 
legitimate, is but very little improved — though we must 
suppose that it has taken one step in advance and has 
really made some positive gain. Its sensibility has taken 
a new phase and is in the direction of a true social and 
sympathetic departure, because it has worked in a pro- 
gressive partnership. 

But its term of organization is so brief that if it were much 
more favorably placed than it can be shown to be, it could 
gain but little experience during its brief organic tenure. 

While it remains part of organic process it must have 
more present sensation than before, as it is associated 
with more dynamic modes of co-operation. But what 
opportunity has it for an ever widening and more and 
more active series of increasing co-operations of a kind 
which will proportionately enlarge its experience into 
comparison and real discrimination? Without these 
there may be sensation, but not mind. 

The dominant individuality, as we shall show with 
much probability, is so placed that it is able to avail itself 
of help from all of the rest, and of the help not only of 
this special local community, but it can also relate itself 
to the vast outside world, and make that also subservient 
to its sentient evolution. But nothing is done to their 
detriment. They simply have not yet attained to their 
supreme opportunity. 

Whether they ever will or will not do so, we do not 
know ; and on this subject it would be useless for us to 
speculate. We only know that it is they who are the great 
organizers ; they who accumulate in every tissue their 
hoards of energy, as bees accumulate honey — not so 
much for themselves as for the good of the wonderfully 
ordered community of interests and especially for the 
interests of the dominant mind. 



CORRELATED THEORY. 

In the progressive evolution of organic forms some 
volition, individual or organic, has gained an increasing 
measure of control over every one of the higher animals. 
Very nearly in exact proportion to the increase of differ- 
entiated structure, and in particular of nervous structure, 
is manifested the corresponding increase in co-ordinated 
directive control. We assume that the one commanding 
Ego in each higher organism is exclusively but one indi- 
vidual unity ! Its extent of development, then, may be 
accurately gauged by the extent of its personal co-opera- 
tion with every part of its organism and by means of this 
organism with the outside world. 

Where the control is largely confined to molar motion 
and locomotion, instinct rather than intelligence may act 
as the guiding stimulus, as it seems to do very largely 
among the lower orders of animals. There is even here 
pronounced, truly individual direction, impelled by the 
personal appetites and their satisfactions. The appetite 
and its gratification both respond to external stimuli, and 
both impel to the search after such stimuli ; hence, fresh 
organization even in extreme age or feebleness, when from 
various causes dissociation has become more potent than 
assimilation. The senses are perhaps as responsive — 
though probably less discriminating and refined in their 
awakened sensations — in a rabbit or an ox as in a human 
being. Perception, comparison of sensations, a low grade 
of thought, with memory, all indicate personal feelings 

34i 



342 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

which could no more be really transferred to any other 
than the internal motions pertaining to any system can 
be actually transferred elsewhere. The mode can be com- 
municated, not the energy which is manifested in that 
particular mode at that moment ; this remains the change- 
less power of the individual whatever the extent and 
variety of its modal changes. 

The intelligently directive Ego of the organism is the 
only one which can properly be denominated — a mind. 
The others may be sentient. They give no satisfactory 
evidence of having yet developed an intelligence which is 
more than blind impelling feeling ; still less of having 
become rational beings. They themselves are pushed 
onward by complex conditions. 

But every organism which has become co-ordinated as 
a physical unity, gives evidence also of being largely under 
the control of a psychic unity which directs its move- 
ments in the search of the food, originates various protec- 
tive devices in its behalf, and otherwise looks after organic 
interests by exercising a manifest if a low order of intelli- 
gence. Doubtless it is not easy to discriminate between the 
unconscious mimicry of intelligence which blind instinct 
and mechanical processes so obviously originate between 
them in the guise of advantageous forms and colors pro- 
duced by accumulative natural selection. But real and 
guiding intelligence comes in somewhere ; and then it 
exerts a definite degree of influence, as every one will 
admit. It helps both ox and man, each in his degree. 

The vital questions are : I. Just where and when does 
a positive intelligence begin to exert its power? 2. What 
is the distinctive character of such intelligence ? 3. What 
are the causes which have evolved it from potentiality 
into actuality, and which still promote its continuous 
evolution under favoring conditions? 

1. No one can expect to distinctly answer the first 
question, any more than he can expect to tell us exactly 



CORRELATED THEORY. 343 

where cold ends and heat begins, or where darkness has 
been changed into light. Feeling is feeling, whether it be 
the dullest sensation of a clam, the thought of a Newton, 
or the moral purpose of a Howard. The difference is in 
the quality and the degree. Sensibility being a potential 
attribute of each relative being, it must spring into actu- 
ality under the right conditions ! 

But sensibility is the mightiest fact of the universe. 
Each individual, regarded as the persistence of a correlated 
process, should evolve personal feeling, provided the im- 
manent power held in limited use is inherently absolute 
living Consciousness. Relative experience must be indi- 
vidual, if absolute consciousness pertains to the Absolute. 
Thus, through motion — which is itself the product of 
correlated limitations — must arise correlated emotion — 
the felt, the living aspect of the same limited product. 
Feeling in action is always immediate and present — the 
obverse of its own somatic changes, but the initiating 
physical causes may be extremely remote ; just as feeling 
itself can initiate very distant results, and as it usually 
secures important ends by the aid of many remote 
coworkers. 

2. Intelligence, distinguished from other experiences, 
may be defined : the discrimination of resemblances and 
differences between feelings and between their objective 
terms — the perceptions arising from unlike causes, either 
simultaneously or successively. There may be a real 
knowledge of actual and active relations. Perception 
differs from mere sensation, and defined purpose from 
instinctive desire, only in being evolved into a higher 
knowledge through comparison of real experiences. 
Sensation and perception have usually an objective origin, 
desire and purpose more subjective initiation ; but there 
is always both objective and subjective co-operation. 

Though feeling is present experience, is always actually 
felt* in the immediate now, yet, as the now of passing 



344 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

moments becomes then in the various past moments — all 
pertaining to one indivisible duration, — so memory, in the 
active now, is consciously identified with like feelings in 
one or several vanished periods; and the feeling, the 
stream of living consciousness, is as indivisible as its 
origin. We see the distant mountain and hear the music 
in the room not by turning rapidly from the one to the 
other, but by receiving both sensations at once through 
different channels. 

3. The causes which evolve potential into actual sen- 
tience are both motions and prior emotions in the individual, 
but, pre-eminently, they are the motions and feelings of others 
so brought into co-operation with one's self that their 
modes are communicated and in this way are made one's 
own. There is this difference between the mind and 
matter sides of the Ego. A past motion — when past and 
transformed into some other motion — has no more efficient 
value, as it has no memory ; but a past feeling, when its 
approximate duplicate is evolved in memory, is related in 
consciousness to the present feeling. The whole sentient 
world between the two events becomes illumined by a 
living light, which every one experiences, but which no 
one can fully put into the clumsy words of our weaker 
current speech. Feeling outruns expression. 

The distinctive characteristic of mind is that, while it 
lives most actively in the present, it is able to look both 
before and after. Its realm, in its comprehensiveness, is 
duration, but in its relative phases, as evolved through 
matter's always present modes, its limitations are in time. 
In this we find some suggestions of what is meant by " in 
conscioussness " and " out of consciousness," as applied 
to any given experience. " Sub-consciousness " and all 
of its phenomena may perhaps become satisfactorily 
explained if we persistently study the generic differences 
between mind and matter — between motion and emotion 
or feeling. 



CORRELATED THEORY, 345 

Matter, as a correlative existence, has only a working 
present. Mind, as a correlative existence, has a working 
present, which, by the aid of material changes — changes 
it can measurably select and control — has at once a past 
and a present and an anticipated future. It must always 
work with its own soma, but outside of that its physical 
helpers are continually changing. Its acquired power 
gained through co-operation depends upon the reach of 
the copartnership, not upon whether it has these or those 
copartners ; as one may give an equally effective thrust 
with a fist, a mallet, or a directed miniature sand-blast. 
The mallet and the sand-blast are its copartners in as real 
if not in quite as intimate a sense as the fist. Their con- 
stituents are more permanent. 

Motion is necessitated to move in the present, and 
only in the present. It is related to past and future only 
through such co-operations, physical and psychical, as 
have modified or as will modify its then present modes of 
process. It exists, as part of the absolute, in duration, but 
it acts only in time, and only in an endlessly present time, 
so that its past and its future have no significance what- 
ever except in their relations to feeling, to mind. 

The great problem, then, is : how can exclusively 
present motion be made to contribute to the progressive 
evolution of mind whose experiences command past and 
present, and can anticipate the future ? 

A very general solution seems to be neither difficult nor 
far to seek ; to work out the entire process in details is 
beyond our present capabilities, yet progress has been 
made in that direction. Science is rapidly penetrating 
into the psychological domain. 

Is it asked how can matter serve mind with adequate 
efficiency? The answer is demonstrable : By enabling 
each mind, in active evolution, to command the services 
of co-operative myriads of physical helpers which cowork 
at once with each other's and with its physical changes. 



346 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

A continuous process, by this means established between 
subject and object, helps the mind to actual knowledge 
of the objective reality. Its knowledge is partial or com- 
plete in just the proportion in which the co-operative 
process is but partial or is more nearly adequate to give 
a perfect knowledge. The entire cycle is one of co-opera- 
tion, in which the mind takes its proper psychical share. 
The attention directs and modifies the somatic changes ; 
these modifications are transmitted to the object, and the 
object remodifies the return currents ; or the process 
may be exactly reversed, the initiation coming from the 
object. 

This is but the bare statement of the theory — to be 
later proved, if it may be, by appeal to the facts. 

The living organism is the primary promoter of such 
co-operations. The gain is almost exclusively that of the 
conscious mind indwelling and working in harmony with 
the manifold organic processes, physical and psychical. 

Sensation is the attendant feeling arising from either 
immediate or mediate physical co-operation between the 
soma and the exciting cause of the sensation. The form 
of the co-operation, its vibratory modified somatic modes, 
determines the character of the sensation. Not until the 
soma becomes itself a participant in the process can the 
sensation respond. Hence organic processes of many 
kinds may be in active operation and yet unfelt, if atten- 
tion, diverted elsewhere, prevents or retards the otherwise 
probable somatic response. 

This may help to explain the familiar experience of 
delayed sensations, and the still more familiar experience 
of a delayed comprehension of something which has been 
said. A delayed memory, which, after the right chain of 
associations has been put into operation through the 
nerve-mechanism, mediating between past and present 
feelings, comes surging into consciousness in its own be- 
lated time. So delayed thoughts sometimes slip into the 



CORRELATED THEORY. 347 

mind just when they are no longer available to the occa- 
sion, already past. 

Our Ego is a tenant of the organism in such working 
relations to every other organized atom that it is con- 
tinuously in, often very indirect, co-operation with them 
all — a varied co-operation, readily maintained by its ever 
active vibrators. But it is in co-operation also with the 
stars whenever it looks up into the midnight sky. The 
eyes of the body are positively essential to sight ; but so 
is the ether which transmits the right modes of motion to 
the eyes. So is the telescope which brings into conscious- 
ness the light of the far distant star that otherwise would 
remain invisible. Vision arises when and only when the 
soma takes an active part in the copartnership of motions 
set up between the object and the physical subject, — the 
feeling being but the sentient side of the somatic motion. 
We can feel in our finger tips, but we can feel also at the 
end of a long pole held in the hand. After a little prac- 
tice, we can with closed eyes learn to estimate the length 
of the pole with which we experiment, and the greater or 
less remoteness of the object investigated, as well as its 
shape and its other salient qualities. This knowledge is 
gained by the sense of feeling obtained through the pole 
as really as through the nerves. The feeling is individual, 
however various and indirect the pathway of communica- 
tion between it and the object which causes the feeling. 
The feeling itself has no here and no there in itself, but 
it learns to locate many of the physical causes through 
which the feeling originates. It often thoughtlessly 
locates the sensation in the object. 

Feeling then is the exact living equivalent of mechanical 
motion. Personal feeling is the equivalent of personal 
motion, of the individual share in every co-operation. 
The quality of the feeling depends entirely and accurately 
upon the rate, the form, the extent, of the induced or, 
conversely, of the inducing somatic vibrations. These 



348 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

may become more and less active at different times in co- 
action with the same stimulus, because the mediating 
organism is in a different condition on these several occa- 
sions. But, other things equal, like and equal physical 
causes produce like and equal sensations, because they 
first produce like and equal somatic modes of motion. 
Conversely, like and equal degrees of feeling, ceteris pari- 
bus, produce like and equal physical modifications, because 
they themselves induce like and equal somatic changes, 
which are then communicated and in form transmitted 
by the appropriate organic channels. 

If with open eyes the attention is directed to a tree, 
we must see the tree ; if its foliage is green we see the 
greeness ; if it has bright flowers we see those ; but if 
we are blind, or color-blind, or look through a blue glass, 
the whole scene is changed, because the lines of co-opera- 
tion have been modified or interruped. Cause and effect 
are as rigorously correlative when co-operation is between 
the sentient and the physical, as when between physical 
and physical. 

The organism stores and compacts, and uses available 
material energy in such nice equilibrium of motions and 
tensions, that feeling can transmute motion in groups in 
a thousand different ways to suit its own desires. Just in 
proportion to the extent of its intelligent command of its 
organism is it able to achieve momentous victories of 
origination at its own volition. Volition is but intelligent 
desire brought into present activity ; it must be carried 
into effect by the co-operative organs. One is often as 
ignorant of how he is enabled to move, or know, or think, 
as of any other unknown fact ; he began to act from 
instinct, and has not yet learned more than what he him- 
self must do in order to produce a chosen result. 

Not till a highly developed nervous structure has been 
gained, can intricate processess of reasoning be sustained. 
Thought is never logical or profound until it is able to 



CORRELATED THEORY, 349 

work through a mobile, complex, co-ordinated mechanism, 
because it is through this mechanism that one is enabled 
to compare feelings of many kinds — recollecting and test- 
ing them, in their many likenesses and differences, separate 
or together, until there has been gained a distinct appre- 
hension of many of their essential relationships. This can 
only be done by reviving past as well as present feelings 
through the fresh production of their near counterparts ; 
and such revivals, whether of past, near, or remote in 
time, can be effected only through immediate and present 
adapted motions. Therefore the mechanism of body and 
brain must be under control that will enable the thinker 
accurately to reproduce and to relate motion to motion 
in sequences as exactly correlated as by any mechanical 
laws and their co-operations, if the thinking is to be con- 
secutive and efficient. The instructed consciousness, 
which is but the mind-side of the somatic vibrations, can 
only test its own knowledges and other feelings by re- 
lating its soma first to the complex responsive brain- 
mechanism, and through it to whatever objective phe- 
nomena it would more fully investigate. 

Thought is purely individual. Its physical partnerships, 
beginning and ending in its own soma, may be infinite in 
number and of all degrees of remoteness both in time and 
space, provided there is the present active interchange of 
physical process, The investigator's success in discovering 
new and wider truths must depend upon his ability to 
manipulate his co-operative implements. He may dream 
the tamest or the wildest reveries and romances by initia- 
ting incongruous and inconsequent relationships, or by 
giving up the helm of physical direction to chance inci- 
dents, as to a disordered digestion ; or he may think in 
syllogisms dry enough and fruitless enough to command 
the most determined skeptic. The thinker is the player 
upon an instrument, good or bad relatively. If he knows 
how to set his helpful keyboard into action he need know 



350 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

nothing else about the structure of his piano. It will do 
its own work. And yet it will give him back the weakest 
or the grandest music, in accurate response to his own 
method of playing upon it. If the rational mind will 
learn to utilize its brain to the best advantage, it will 
respond by giving him back an ever broadening and more 
accurate knowledge. 

As sensation is the really accurate gauge of its aggre- 
gate of associated objective causes, so reproduced and 
compared sensation — thinking, mental relationing which 
is but imitated and tested sensation, reintroduced under 
various new conditions that present it to us in many 
different aspects — can be made to give us actual and 
accurate knowledge of the real objective world and of 
its manifold correlativities. 

As the musician becomes more and more skilful in 
forming new and grander combinations of sound, so does 
the thinker in his combinations of thought. The musical 
instrument if properly used becomes mellowed in tone ; 
but the brain not only increases the efficiency of all the 
old lines of co-operation, it adds new ones. It promptly 
" grows to " whatever usage it is required to forward ; 
and as the musician becomes skilful in judging of the 
smooth adaptations of sounds, so does the thinker in 
judging of the correlativities of thoughts. Practice, if it 
does not make perfect, certainly leads towards perfection 
in every operation which is under the guidance of the 
intellect. 

But if the instrument, whether pianoforte or telescope, 
or nerve structure, or muscle, or woodman's axe, has 
become disordered so that it can no longer act efficiently 
in co-ordination with the sensibility of the worker, of 
course he can no longer achieve good results. The con- 
scious worker, although but one, must either secure the 
nicest adaptations between all co-operations of his manifold 
implements — which may be minds as well as motions and 



CORRELATED THEORY. 35 1 

tensions — or he is likely to achieve but little of very high 
value. 

According to the theory, sentience actively partici- 
pates indirectly at every stage of every co-operation, 
in the inorganic as really as in the organic domain. 
The justest, the highest, the most truly economic use 
of possible implements must be the wonderful lesson 
which sooner or later we are all compelled to learn from 
experience, and often from experience which seems to 
have been much too dearly bought. Minds are the 
teachers of minds. 

The social human world being as much a part though 
not a physical part of our co-operative environment as 
our own brains and our physical senses, and immeasura- 
bly more akin to our true personality, the question of 
equity in co-operation becomes imperative ! We dis- 
cover the essential germs of Nature's basis of morals laid 
deeply in the first foundations of organization itself. But 
a growing system of morality, of justice, of good-will, of 
mutual helpfulness, in connection with the ever widen- 
ing associated growth of sentience must be evolved in 
the same way that all other knowledge is evolved. 
The rights of all are equally sacred and alike to be 
respected. 

Since the individual mind can gain its experience only 
by the help of others, its first and its last desires must be 
for more and wider adapted co-operation ; then as intelli- 
gence and moral sense become developed, its ever present 
problems are how best to help both others and one's self, do- 
ing injustice to none, but advancing all associated interests. 
Instinct can work only blindly, guided by results and 
checked by mechanical limitations. But the rational mind 
develops a moral knowledge and a possible integrity as it 
discovers relations in any other science, through pro- 
longed comparative study submitted to practical verifica- 
tion. Here, as elsewhere, knowledge can be communicated 



352 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

from one to another until the wisdom of one shall become 
the possession of all ! 

And yet each must know and must act for himself ! Is 
his volition chained to the strongest motive ? Do we 
mean by that much repeated phrase, the strongest 
motive present in one's consciousness ? We often decide 
from motives neither of which is fully present directly in 
consciousness. We use the motives algebraically as sym- 
bols and decide between them in the same way that we 
work with the symbols of truths in all intellectual pro- 
cesses — from an almost compelled intellectual economy. 
If every proposition and every choice had to be realized 
in a present sense, our chief intellectual work would be 
that of imagination. No strongest motive objectively 
considered has as yet been quite discovered, any more 
than the most ultimate truth has probably yet been dis- 
covered. We are forever forced to compare motive with 
motive and to put aside some motives in favor of others 
which are chosen for various reasons both personal and 
impersonal. The goal of desire is quite as often in the 
future as in the present. It becomes increasingly so with 
the higher evolution of the individual, and still more with 
the helpful evolution of the community as a whole. The 
weakest man is forced by abounding social conditions to 
learn that he can and must often put aside a powerful 
present impulse for an inducement to which he has as yet 
no decided individual preference or attraction. 

A free will is desire which can hold itself in check 
while the intellect balances its own practical questions. 
Will and intellect are but two differenced kinds of feel- 
ings. Either may rule, as one may turn a free wheel in 
this way or in that. But it becomes increasingly evident 
that the part of wisdom is wise, and that the highest wis- 
dom is impersonal, is humanitarian. 

When we turn to the Absolute and ask concerning a 
possible knowledge of the non-relative, here also we claim 



CORRELATED THEORY. 353 

that the Absolute, the Infinite Existence is not wholly 
unknowable since it is here, immanent in every act of our 
conditioned, limited, and related lives and methods. If 
we drop out of view all relativities and their modes of 
process, there is still left power, wisdom, beneficence, an 
abiding rational vitality — all with an unlimitness which we 
can by no means compass, yet which neither can we ignore, 
discredit, or banish from among our profoundest beliefs. 
Knowledge of the Absolute, of the Unlimited, is held 
rather to be the one unchanging basis upon which all other 
knowledge of related changes is for ever firmly grounded. 

It has seemed wise to somewhat carefully outline the 
correlated theory before going further into the details of 
mental evolution, as the facts are interpreted in the light 
of its assumptions. The propositions which the multi- 
plicity of data is supposed to sustain are liable to be 
lost sight of from the very superabundance of evidence 
brought forward in their support. For this reason it has 
generally seemed best to give the theory first, or such 
portions of it as were to be more immediately discussed, 
and to bring forward evidences in support of its positions 
subsequently. 

To understand clearly just what is expected to be 
proved, even at the risk of considerable repetition, in fol- 
lowing discussions connected with complicated and 
difficult phenomena, is always a great gain. Then, as all 
phenomena are interdependent, every phase and every 
fact throws its own glow of added illumination upon 
everything else, and the apprehension, quickened by the 
same light, travels more readily to its objects guided by 
the special radiance. 

The changing and the persisting, the limited and the 
unlimited, the finite and the infinite, the relative and the 
absolute, are correlatives only in idea. Abstractly each is 
a negation of the other. In reality the lesser terms in 
each case are internally correlated modifications which 

*3 



354 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

inhere in the unrelated persisting real, together making 
but one undivided part of it. 

Thus correlated changes, minus their correlations, are 
in very substance in and of the persisting — in that sense, 
the unchanging. The limited is limited by correlative 
limitations, and outside of these it is undivided part and 
parcel of the unlimited. The finite, minus the finite 
bounding correlations which give it all of its special char- 
acteristics, is literally and actually of the undivided 
infinite. The relative also is internally related by its own 
dependent terms, and with the removal of these it would 
be returned into the indivisible Absolute, as an indistin- 
guishable part of the totality of Being. 

The individual, then, is individual solely by virtue of 
his innate constitutional limitations. His individual 
changes, physical and mental, are inseparable, because 
but two aspects arising from the same causes, and if they 
become conscious experiences they must be exclusively 
personal to himself, because they arise in his limited, in- 
dividualized, or personalized nature. 

His primary motion changes — the cycle of unmodified 
atomic rhythm — are exclusively internal and internally 
initiated. Secondary motion changes are reciprocal 
responses to co-operating manifold changes in other 
conditioned beings. Such co-operative changes become 
more and more felt, realized, and self-appreciative, just in 
proportion to their widely and more and more variously 
extended modifiability acquired through co-operations 
becoming progressively more differentiated in kinds and 
in amounts. His experiences are not the experiences of 
his nascent collaborators, as a rule, nor are theirs his, be- 
cause the specific part taken by each worker in any general 
organic process is usually very widely differentiated. A 
man in the act of throwing a stone will illustrate the 
extremely different part taken in this copartnership by 
the ultimate individuals. 



CORRELATED THEORY. 355 

But two conscious minds in close communication and 
in about the same stage of mental evolution may very 
largely share the same thoughts, feelings, plans, and pur- 
poses. And yet each has his own exclusive consciousness. 
His feelings are all internal experiences absolutely per- 
sonal to himself. 

Then, since one is individualized solely by constitu- 
tional correlations, he is not only a relative being, but in 
the eternal substance of his being he is now and always 
of the Absolute. He is now and always an actually 
undivided part of the Infinite. Hence if we study our 
own entire natures, both relative, and absolute, if we look 
both within and without, questioning the whole of Being, 
related and unrelated, we surely may gain very definite 
conceptions not only as to " man's place in nature," but also 
as to man's place among the immortal verities. 

Our inquiries into the Non-relative are not remote, nor 
are they the study of the far removed. The changeless 
truths are here in the very midst of the ever changing. 
By holding them in a helpful mental contrast, as an ever- 
present background, a growing familiarity with their like- 
nesses and differences may give us a consciousness of 
steadily dawning real and possibly very definite ideas 
about even the eternal Realities. 




CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE 
ORGANISM. 

No one is able to control all of the functions and pro- 
cesses of his organism, many of which work on without 
his volition, his faintest cognizance of their methods or 
even of their existence ; yet whenever the attention per- 
sistently turns toward any such apparently self-guiding 
organic action, there is much evidence that the directive 
consciousness can almost at once make itself felt as a co- 
operative influence. In time, if it would take the needful 
means, it probably could establish itself as the directive 
power in every bodily process. Whether in many cases 
this would be a personal gain or loss, it would be hard to 
say; but that in time an almost absolute control over 
one's own ever renewable federation of coworkers could 
be acquired, and stronger and longer maintained, one 
finds but little reason to doubt. 

Use is the great ally of growth and of available power 
in any and in every direction. Over-exercise of any kind 
will enfeeble ; but healthful, equilibrated work and rest 
always upbuild and strengthen. It is the workman's arms, 
the dancer's legs, the epicure's stomach, the thinker's 
brain, which become even abnormally capable through 
habitual usage. After a perhaps extraordinary ability has 
been gained by the stimulated organ, the obvious growth 
may cease and the available power seem to reach its max- 
imum. At this stage especially, over stimulus to exertion 

356 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 357 

may bring on organic degeneracy and loss of the special 
gain previously acquired. 

This is not because the materials for growth are not still 
abundant, nor is it because, other things equal, like means 
will not always produce like results. It is the " other 
things " which no longer efficiently co-operate. Either 
the system is burdened with harmful and inefficient ma- 
terial which acts as a dead weight to effort, or some of 
the other organs are enfeebled from want of use, or other 
causes, so that the needed organic equipoise is seriously 
threatened. We must gauge a co-operative whole by its 
weakest part. No one can be supposed to have attained 
his highest possible power of any kind ; he can only have 
failed because he has failed to keep the due organic bal- 
ance for the associated whole. Good food, fresh air, and 
muscular exertion often revive a tired brain far more than 
passive rest. Contented feeling and high thinking are 
aids to digestion as truly as a good digestion is the fore- 
runner of every other attainment. All this is because 
mind and body are equivalent partners. Imagination can 
produce and establish diseases as effectively as physical 
causes. A fixed idea that one is to die of cholera, or 
fever, or cancer has the strongest tendency to develop 
the dreaded ailment. By brooding over it, one can think 
a soreness into his eyes as truly and almost as grievously 
as into his heart. Men have branded themselves with a 
red mark of the cross by the simple contagion of thinking 
about it ; and rheums and rheumatisms often spring up in 
the congenial soil of too much solicitude to bar them out. 
This only illustrates the ceaseless action and reaction 
between the mind and matter sides of actively conditioned 
beings. Literally, as a man thinks so is he — if he will 
but think persistently enough. 

One may acquire the power of moving his ears like a 
wild animal by trying repeatedly until the right muscles 
have gained development. The acrobat becomes more 



358 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

elastic than a rubber ball ; and the parlor lady can soften 
her muscles till they are almost as weak and small as her 
own baby's if she chooses the right means. The liver 
can be conjured into a torpid action ; the heart itself can 
be made to halt or palpitate by listening intently enough 
for either result. 

Our nightly sleep, the winter rest of the bear, the re- 
puted months or years in which the Eastern fakir dies to 
voluntary consciousness and activity, are but smaller and 
larger examples of the partial withdrawing of the conscious 
personality from its more customary co-operations. Living 
as we do habitually in one and the same body as to out- 
ward form with its almost insensible changes, which never- 
theless produce important modifications in our sensibili- 
ties, we yet have a personal power to relate our feelings 
more and less strongly and directly with each and with 
all of the various bodily operations. When extremely 
intent upon any one thing we are comparatively ob- 
livious to all other things ; but we may turn in quick 
succession to the most dissimilar interests, as from the 
trivial to the important, and back again, with the readiest 
facility. 

Also, if experience can prove anything, it can show us 
that we are able to attend to more than one thing at once, 
not by turning with rapid action from the one to the other, 
but by responding simultaneously to the several solicita- 
tions whose activities do not conflict. Thus, while listen- 
ing to the wind, we can watch the flight of a bird and 
feel the clinging fondness of the little child we hold in our 
arms — all in the same identical moment. 

These different interests awaken different but entirely 
compatible feelings which appeal to different qualities of 
our complex though unified sensibility. If each one of 
us is a distinct mind-matter unity, having many physical 
parts which can be as variously modified simultaneously 
as the differently originated but commingled feelings are 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 359 

in the living experience, the whole matter becomes com- 
paratively simple and intelligible. 

We are related, for example, to the nervous structure 
through which the vibrations of sound are brought to us, 
and to which we physically and co-operatively respond 
through literal somatic elements which are specially 
adapted to co-operate with the unique modes of motion, 
sound objectively considered. Other somatic vibrators 
are allied to the mechanism of vision, and every part of the 
personal soma is or may be in more and less active phys- 
ical communication, direct or indirect, with every least 
tissue of the unified organism. The organism is as really 
our environment, our only more or less temporary envi- 
ronment, with which we are now in active helpful copart- 
nership through the mutual exchange of modes of motion, 
as the tree is against which we lean a moment for rest, as 
the fruit of the tree is which we gather and eat, as the 
distant cloud is which sheds its nourishing rain upon the 
tree. Co-operation, physically considered, being either 
intimate or remote, the soma may either wholly or par- 
tially withdraw from any particular organic process, as 
when one, on closing the eyes, need no longer direct the 
attention to visible objects with which at another time he 
is in cheerful co-operation. 

The conscious mind is not actively essential to any 
simply organic process. Should the mind wholly with- 
draw, in a brief time, doubtless, the organism would fall 
into hopeless disorder, since, mind having assumed direc- 
tion so long and so positively, every process has become 
greatly dependent upon intelligent direction and aid. 
But old age lives on in its dotage, and in sickness the 
body performs some portion of its proper functions 
though the mind seems to have become a present blank. 
But let the intelligence bestir itself to guide its soma into 
different lines of active co-operations, which can go on 
smoothly together without interference. I believe on the 



360 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

testimony of my own experience that then the mind can, 
in one and the same precise instant, see and hear and 
taste and have a sense of touch, and can know that it is 
in the present enjoyment of each and all of these differ- 
entiated feelings. 

Whether a mind could or could not simultaneously 
direct its attention into all of these unlike modes of 
activity without the help of extra-organic stimulus may 
be questioned, but that it can at the same precise time 
respond to several diverse stimulations, and can know 
that it does so respond, can be tested and verified by 
actual experiment. The psycho-physicists who are now 
occupied with the time problem of the sensations, will do 
well to turn their investigations towards the important 
problem : Do the disparate senses act together as well as 
in succession ? And, other things equal, is the mental 
response both simultaneous and successive ? 

To give one's attention to anything must be in some 
way actively to relate the mind, which feels and knows, to 
the something which is felt and known. Then since in 
vision one mechanism is called into action, and in hearing 
quite another mechanism is helping to open the com- 
munication between the knowing power and the power 
known, there can be no outside reason why both mech- 
anisms should not be acting together in a common time. 
The soma if admitted to be itself a complex of semi- 
detached physical energies, every mode of which consti- 
tutionally involves adapted and related living sensibility, 
each phase influencing allied phases according to the 
nature of its own changes, the actual facts of life, physical 
and mental, then become entirely comprehensible. 

So long as the environment initiates the chief modifica- 
tions to which the conscious mind instinctively responds 
with feeling which is so little intelligent that the action 
hardly rises above that of mechanical reaction ; and so 
long as feeling, when initiative, is little more than blind 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 36 1 

instinct reinforced by habit, the organism must be almost 
wholly moulded and determined in form, size, and all 
other physical characteristics, down to every least organ 
and function, by the prevailing conditions of its envi- 
ronment. 

And the psychical life, both of the endless procession 
of the incoming and outgoing successively organized 
and deorganized particles, and also the psychical devel- 
opment of the increasingly directive mind, must be largely 
determined by the chance nature of the correspondence 
between the organism and its characteristic surroundings. 
The Amphibian will develop into the comparatively low 
and sluggish life and the unwieldy form most appropriate 
to its kingdom of mud and indeterminateness. The fish 
will acquire his gills, his fins, his appropriate flatness in 
shape. Started in adapted directions, the descendants, 
considering the conditions in which they live, can be 
expected to gain but slowly upon the estate of their 
ancestors. 

Given a sensibility constitutionally cumulative, in all 
primary stages of evolution the environment must almost 
wholly decide the growing characteristics both of body 
and mind. The environment neither creates the mind 
nor its possibilities in the future, but it does almost 
wholly control its possibilities in the present both by 
affording a given kind and amount of opportunity and by 
cutting off all other opportunities. It both reciprocates 
and compels reciprocity at every detail of every co-op- 
eration. It becomes at once help and hindrance. 

The nascent sensibility is shut up in the prison which 
limits its somatic modes and co-operations, and the prison 
is almost as limited in many phases of organic as of inor- 
ganic process. Nor is it merely the rank and file to whom 
organic opportunity decrees thus far but no farther. 
The nascent sensibility of the fish, though it may direct 
the organic muscles and learn to promote the well-being 



362 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

of its growing organism, can only attain to the mental 
status of the fish ; the horse can only develop the mind 
of a horse ; the elephant, of an elephant. 

The environment is the mould in which each indeter- 
minate organism is cast and by which it is at once shaped 
and limited, and the mind can work only with and 
through the associated organism, controlled by the same 
conditions. Hence to all immaturity the vast impor- 
tance of its surrounding ! So far Darwin and others in 
their almost exhaustive study of the facts have amply 
justified their conclusions as to the shaping and dominat- 
ing power of external conditions. 

The human child is as dependent upon his surround- 
ings, upon the organic and inorganic conditions, upon 
ancestral bias and all other moulding influences, as any 
of the lower creatures. Every mind, the most mature 
equally with the immature, must work directly through 
its own soma y so that, whatever the correlations physically, 
the mind can only adapt itself to their possibilities. 

The only hope of large mental requirements is in the 
somatic alliance with efficient coworkers over which the 
mind can gain control enough to direct their processes in 
lines which will secure its mental advantage and advance- 
ment. An intelligence can always do that with some 
degree of efficiency. But it can do more. It can pro- 
gressively reorganize the organism itself, and to a great 
extent it can command its external allies. It has also 
the power of selection among the possible elements with 
which it is willing to co-operate, and it can impel the 
organism into a more and more helpful seconding of its 
interests. The furtherance of mental gain is the sole 
meaning of organization. 

An efficient individual mind has always been developed 
through an efficient organism. But that the controlling, 
the consciously directive mind is individual, and in no 
sense composite — although its sensibility is of many 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 363 

modes and changes, and it learns to work effectively by the 
help of an increasingly compound mechanism, — we hope 
will become increasingly evident. That each conscious 
mind within certain limits is a positive controlling power 
over its organism cannot be doubted. Just as little can 
it be doubted that action upon the organism can compel 
sensation to arise in the mind. In some way, then, they 
are working together as true correlates. But every other 
organized atom and molecule does its work also in perfect 
correlation with the co-operative body which has become 
an actively associated federation. How then does one 
become conscious, the others not ? 

A sentient individuality once evolved into self-con- 
scious experience, the acquired accumulation of feeling 
is indestructible if the something which feels still persists. 
The mind may come into the organism very much on 
a par with its associates, like them feeling nothing but the 
instinctive craving for more feeling — blindly impelling it 
to motion associately directed, because such motion gives 
the immediate increase of feeling. But not only is an 
individual sensibility as a total indestructible if once 
acquired, but all of its varying experiences can be recalled 
provided the same or equivalent conditions can be re- 
established. 

This, then, is the potential mind whose methods of or- 
ganic evolution we are trying to interpret and intelligently 
to comprehend. 

But first let us more fully indicate the present status 
of an average highly sentient individual in his present 
organic relations. 

His fellow organizers and coworkers, equally immortal 
with himself, in sentient gains are about where he was 
when very nearly at the beginning of his mind-progress. 
They also are each sharers in absolute Being, but as con- 
ditioned individualities, while they are perfect and com- 
plete physically, they have attained to no personal 



364 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

experience, so far as we can judge, beyond that of the 
lowest grades of sensation, with no or almost no percep- 
tive discrimination. Thus they are pre-eminently matter; 
but individualized, and, possibly, heirs to a future high 
estate. 

We need no more scruple about haling them into our 
service than about breathing the air, or wielding an iron 
hammer, for the ultimate atoms all have potential life and 
mind, at stages of gaining sensibility we benevolently 
hope. Whether particles of iron will ever go much higher 
in sentient evolution is the unanswered question we hand 
over to a wiser future. Meantime here are the hosts of 
coworking organizers, busy to-day as yesterday in our 
special behalf. We freely accept their services, since pre- 
sumably we shall do each of them good and not evil by 
doing so — in which case the sentient service may be as 
equal as all physical co-operations are. 

Let us fully realize that they have the organizing, nutri- 
tive, and recuperative services almost wholly in their own 
keeping. Even this is a trifle better than it would be, if 
left in the hands of wholly dead, unfeeling matter and 
law, as hitherto has generally been supposed. Since our 
interest is their interest, though unknown to them, the 
common advantage is sought after with feeling. 

The operations of the stomach, for example, are not 
directed by ourselves. Ordinarily they are not consciously 
felt ; yet they are carried forward to a definite gain in an 
orderly, systematic manner. We have taken out of the 
hands of these organizers the search for food, the cooking 
and mastication of it. To that extent it is we who regu- 
late the quantity and quality of the supplies. At every 
step beyond that we are utterly ignorant and incapable. 
They have the final selection. They elaborate, transform, 
and circulate the carefully prepared nutriment ; they exer- 
cise the benign impartiality of the master of the vineyard 
— giving to the workers who come in at the eleventh hour 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERA TIVE ORGANISM. 365 

equally with those who have toiled all day. The young 
growths, the hurt, the wearied, all special needs, are amply 
and beneficently supplied. 

We are told, on the one hand, that all provisions of this 
class have been pre-arranged, predetermined by a Divine 
intelligence and love. Granted ! But Divinity attains its 
ends by the use of means. On the other hand, it is as- 
serted confidently that the means, from first to last, can 
be traced as an unbroken chain of material changes. 
Granted also ! But what is there to hinder material 
changes from having a possible living sense of each change 
as it passes ; from being conditioned with a constitu- 
tional, potential sensibility, which will become active 
whenever the material change is active enough to excite 
the feeling? Then the feeling side of any unit of such 
conditioned being must increase in strength and variety 
of experience with increased physical co-operations dy- 
namic enough in their resulting modifications to excite, 
and correspondingly to relate, the equally active sensi- 
bility. 

Life, and its growing experiences, which are mind, are 
here ; they originate somewhere. Why should they not 
come as a potential inheritance from the Absolute, in 
which all relativity must inhere ? • In the nature of the 
case, the personal experience, the actual stream of ac- 
quired feeling, must be progressively gained ; but the 
relative constitution of things through which it can be 
acquired, like all other correlativity, must be in and of 
Absolute Being. It must be the ever persisting, limited 
as to its manifestations by correlated series of progressive 
changes. And these changes constitute the evolving in- 
dividual mind. 

A mind so conditioned must continue to gain experi- 
ence so long as it can continue in efficient working 
co-ordination with other correlated beings. It is only in 
the organism that the whole associated process begins to 



366 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

work together so successfully as to afford the long-waited- 
for opportunity for commensurate mental evolution to the 
one individual in whose interest mainly and by whose 
co-operation the entire organic process is evolved. 

And yet the working together successfully evidently 
begins with the feeling together. The common motor im- 
pulse was thus gained by the first organizing federation 
of units with some acquired blind sensibility. It is the 
shared feeling which continues to organize and to reor- 
ganize every tissue from first to last, aided by all other 
adapted working conditions. Even nascent sensation, 
associated in molar motion, can add exactly the needed 
stimulus to organization, because its one impulse, its 
desire for more sensation, is to push on, on ! in the direc- 
tion of the supply — exactly what is needed in order to 
change inorganic co-operation and its unremunerative 
processes into organic co-operation and its continuously 
remunerative methods. 

Then with the differentiated outgrowing conditions and 
their necessities begins differentiated feeling, even in 
the humblest organizers. Breathing to-day is only 
very partially under our control. The entire apparatus 
has been evolved, not by ourselves, but by the humbler 
coworkers upon whom we are in complete dependence. 
We have kept in close enough alliance to hold the 
mechanism in check for brief periods and to enable us to 
regulate its sensible rhythm to some extent when we 
please to do so, but usually all respiration is carried on 
quite automatically — that is to say, it is carried on within 
the mechanism itself by the help which it receives from 
outside energy utilized in the process. 

The result is the inhalation of more energy, without 
which all organic process would come to a speedy halt. 
Breathing is distinctively an organic rhythm, and without 
vanity we may claim that it conduces chiefly to our 
individual good as conscious minds. 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 367 

This rhythm, recognized by our sensations, is like the 
sensible rhythm of sound waves, but back of these, in 
each case, is the insensible rhythm, of which we have no 
direct knowledge, over which we have little direct con- 
trol, but which, co-operatively, constitutes the molar 
rhythm, of which we are conscious. The nascent sensa- 
tions of the workers must be the sentient aspects, wholly 
or chiefly, of the primary rhythms. As individuals, no 
one of them can be supposed to realize, as we do, the 
complex in-breathing and out-breathing of respiration, 
nor is any one of them able, as we are, for a brief period 
to inhibit the associated process. 

All organic changes are, normally, present dynamic 
co-operations, or the preparation or provision for increased 
future dynamic co-operation. The exhaling scavengers 
and all the rest of the class work indirectly to that 
end as their legitimate function. Successive additions of 
organized material are successive additions of largely 
dynamic energy. The differentiation into special organs 
with their differenced functions is dynamic advance, both 
in the quantity and the quality of the working methods. 
The budding and dividing into partially detached or subse- 
quently detached organisms is all in the interest of 
increased organization. 

The strengthening and recuperation attending all nor- 
mal exercise, the healing of wounds and diseases, the 
co-ordinating of all processes into one effective total, in 
which every change is somewhat modified by every other, 
and the progress in one is progress in all, — each of these 
and all similar helpful coworking is distinct dynamic 
gain. In extreme age, when smaller and larger illnesses 
and accidents have entailed corresponding weaknesses, 
when excesses and manifold imprudences have produced 
checks and distortions, when under-exercise and over- 
exercise have both helped in their several ways to 
accumulate small asymmetries, and the growing median i- 



368 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

cal hindrances to vital readjustments make co-operative 
direction more and more difficult, there is still an onflow 
of actual growth, of continued dynamic gain. Com- 
plex functions, almost in organic checkmate, are yet 
carrying onward the utmost possible range of helpful 
co-operations. 

The self-conscious mind is the sole and only inheritor 
of this entire system of co-ordinated and continuous 
advance. True, it cannot directly control all tissues or 
their processes, but indirectly it receives the benefit of all 
that they are and of all that they do, in the interest of an 
actual evolution of experience exclusive to itself. 

The phenomena of age, of sickness, of a mutilated 
organism, instead of teaching the lessons often derived 
from them, that mind is a property or a temporary result 
of organic process, teach the infinitely more grateful 
truth, that, in primary initiation and subsequent organiza- 
tion and differentiation of functions, the facts can be 
much more rationally explained by the assumption that 
co-operative sensibility, of a dawning social type, is the 
directive and only progressive stimulus. The real gain 
in organic process, the no actual gain in the inorganic, 
obviously can be accounted for by the influence brought 
to bear upon mechanical correlations by nascent desire 
with its onward impulsion in the one case, but not in the 
other. Whether the feeling is the action or the reaction, 
in its correspondence with environment, is non-essential ; 
it is a potent if an unconsciously impelling force. With 
inorganic conditions sensibility must remain vaguely 
receptive, having no active opportunities. 

Of course it is possible to class the theory of a joint 
physical and psychical individuality among the countless 
chimeras invented by the fertile human imagination. 
The theory that organization distinctively results from 
the stimulus brought to bear by the associated sensibility 
of the myriads of faintly conscious organizers, can be 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 369 

reckoned equally visionary. But study the facts. How 
otherwise can they be, or have they been, as rationally 
interpreted ? 

It is intrinsically reasonable that mind should be gradu- 
ally evolved by such co-ordinations as can increase an 
active personal experience. The mutual helpfulness is 
an argument in favor of the theory. It coincides en- 
tirely with the fundamental conception of individuality 
conditioned by active modes of energizing. All known 
facts, to my possibly biased apprehension, jointly add 
special corroborative testimony. 

There is no extreme absurdity in the postulates; there 
is nothing uncanny in realizing that while we ourselves 
are the immeasurable gainers from our active organisms, 
yet that millions of successive nascent minds are aided, if 
ever so little, in a real individual evolution by helping on 
our incalculably greater advancement. The theory justi- 
fies the benevolence of the established order of things 
and leads to a reinterpretation of many facts which must 
be held up in the light of a steadily practical beneficence. 
The mind has gained and still gains its experience, and it 
is enabled to do its own proper work by receiving organic 
help ; but more remotely it equally receives as vitally 
important, more extensive, and really higher kinds of 
inorganic helpful co-operation. 

The social world with its acquired knowledge, com- 
municated by spoken or written symbols, can be called 
an organism only in a figurative sense ; yet its helpfulness 
to every already self-conscious mind is far more potent 
than any mere organic aid possibly can be to its own 
dominant mind. Yet neither is without the other. Eyes 
or ears, or the sense of touch in the case of the both deaf 
and blind, are essential to all social gains. But so also is 
the inorganic medium. In the evolution of mind after it 
reaches the opportunities afforded to even the lowest 
humanity, there is a gradual increase in those co-operative 



370 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

processes in which the mind takes an active and a con- 
sciously directive part. With all increase of such 
dynamic co-partnerships comes the corresponding in- 
crease of personal experience ; so that ultimately the 
co-operators are much more inorganic than organic. 

Our briefly stated position is that so long as such 
co-operations are kept within legitimate bounds there is 
gain rather than loss to one and all of the participants. 

In age and sickness, not the mind but the organism has 
become disordered. Connections are broken or imperfectly 
related ; it is no longer efficient in performing its part in 
the customary associated co-operations. The mind may 
be more ready to enter into increasingly broader working 
partnerships than ever before ; but it is shut in by pro- 
cesses weak and halting, and sometimes manifesting the 
encroachment of methods more inorganic than organic. 
We emphatically live in a world of correlations. Every 
stage of our development is dependent at once upon 
others as well as upon ourselves. At first they are every- 
thing, we almost nothing. In a vigorous mature organism 
all this is reversed. We are almost omnipotent, or might 
become so ; then for a time the great opportunities have 
passed. We are helpless. Every process shared by 
many coworkers is proportionately liable to disorder ; 
and no organism has as yet been able to escape the 
usual penalty of all great corporations. 

Combinations between the coworkers are temporary in 
their essential nature, because many remote outside in- 
fluences are perpetually tending to produce more or less 
unbalance, and when this becomes, for any cause, so great 
that the strain in counterbalancing directions is too 
severe, the copartnership must be given up. That is 
exactly the case in the relations between the dominant 
mind and its organism. Nothing can disturb its own 
primary correlativities ; many things may so unbalance 
the processes of its organic environment that for a time it 






CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 37 1 

can only remain partially helpless awaiting the final disso- 
lution of the nearly useless coworker. All of the lesser 
multitudes are in the same evil plight and so dissolution 
is inevitable. 

But neither the conscious mind nor the nascent minds 
are in any more danger of destruction than is the atomic 
material system to which each one of them is inseparably 
allied. They are all of them ready for new associations. 
It is not only possible but it has been fully shown that 
many of them are not wholly dissociated by the organic 
breaking up. Some tissues live for a brief period as 
tissues, but atoms remain in co-operative groups after all 
molar processes have discontinued. 

That the one individual atom hitherto so highly favored 
will be forced out of the fraternity into isolation, deserted 
by its closest helpers, is far from probable. At any rate, 
the fact that it can no longer work to advantage with a 
failing organism is not a valid reason for assuming that it 
must lose finally the personal experience which it has 
already gained. Presumably this must include the ability 
to re-establish the equivalent or more than the equivalent 
of its organic copartnership, and we may infer that it will 
continue its evolution upon even a higher basis than 
before. But it would be untimely to enter now upon 
this phase of the discussion, and we will only add that in 
a universe of abundant resources, visible and invisible, 
there can be no difficulty surely about finding an equiva- 
lent and far more efficient copartnership. 

On the physical side merely, a particle neither gains 
nor loses by being fettered and made practically helpless 
by its associates. One unit in the heart of a granite 
boulder receives no harm and probably but little good 
though it should remain there for untold ages. In end- 
less duration a thousand years are as one day. And these 
are all in the realm of the immortals ! Then the conscious 
individual, though it be hindered possibly as much as 



372 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

helped in sickness and in the closing days of organic dis- 
solution, has gained all that it has gained of experience 
through the organized helpfulness, and whenever any 
adapted conditions can be re-established, be that soon or 
late, the past experience can be recalled by a parallel 
method to that which enables one repeatedly to call 
up the nearer past in memory. 

All real analogies and multitudes of most dissimilar 
facts lead to that inference. The death of the body is 
only a more general breaking up than the dying daily of 
every bodily tissue, and though the method is dissimilar, 
the disintegration of iron upon its surface into rust, until 
the whole has become a powder, is exactly analogous so 
far as association, dissociation, and reassociation are con- 
cerned. As reasonably assume that the several units in 
a molecule of iron-rust can never again become parts of 
an iron mass, or of an atmospheric molecule, or of some 
more complex substance than either, as to assume that a 
mind-matter unit or any of its closest associates, when 
they have become fully dissociated from the organism, 
will never again become parts of a yet more helpful work- 
ing fraternity. 

The probabilities lie in favor of the conscious persist- 
ence of the mind, because intelligence — a rational correla- 
tion with a universe which we believe to be demonstrably 
the result of absolute forecast and intelligence — the 
evolved relative intelligence, the highest known achieving 
power in our domain of co-operations, should also be the 
most persistent. The human mind even in its lowest 
estate, has learned to do something towards its own 
advancement. Where its. attainments are highest it can 
not only command large areas of the physical world, but 
it can immensely advance not merely its own highest 
interests but also the best interests of the race. The 
mind has but just reached the high level at which it 
is beginning to understand the nature of its almost 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 373 

supreme possibilities as well as its vast responsi- 
bilities. 

Mind is but just learning the nature of its own power, 
the nature of its power over kindred minds — in brief, the 
nature and modes of its copartnerships, physical and 
psychical. But it has already learned and practised for 
centuries past innumerable ways of so modifying its co- 
workers, largely upon the physical side, as to indefinitely 
promote its own mental advancement. Such knowledge 
should be able to serve this advanced intellect with its 
wide command of power somewhat effectively under all 
possible future conditions. 

The iron-rust, the iron mass, the oxygen molecule, even 
the most healthy active and mature organism undirected 
by the conscious mind, is purely at the mercy of circum- 
stances. Almost as many separations as combinations are 
endlessly repeated, but this is no reason for arguing that 
any acquired real gain can be destroyed. If life is con- 
tinuous, its experiences all pertain to that life and are 
inseparable from it. To assume otherwise would always 
have been unreasonably inconsequent, if nature were not 
so many-sided that any one aspect can be made to over- 
shadow all the others. 

It seems impossible to decide how far our awakened and 
evolved sensibilities have superseded, have redirected, the 
nascent desires of the humbler work-folk who now do our 
bidding. But we do know that no embryo being of the 
dominant order, from the reptile up to man, has deliber- 
ately assumed the leading role in his organism or has con- 
sciously chosen the part which he now finds himself very 
cheerfully enacting. It came to him in some way through 
a fitting division of labor, and is a new outcropping of 
the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection. The rank and 
file come and go with every cycle of his related changes ; 
with very breath he breathes. He survives because it is 
fittest that he should survive, since he is the most capable 



374 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

and best adapted to survive. Every interest by this 
method is best subserved ; so that mental and material 
go hand in hand. 

From the pushing out together of the undefined pro- 
tuberances of the amoeba or any similar almost un- 
organized protoplasm in the early, groping, molar motions, 
to the limitless flexibility of the educated human arm, is a 
way as long and as much onward in its own kind as the 
sentient way upward from their nascent reach for more, 
to Darwin himself in his outreach after the everywhere 
branching and differentiating evolution of science. 

The co-operating instincts, spurred on by their immediate 
reward, are yet directed nowhere in particular. The 
barest impulse moves the rudder and the ship drifts into 
whatever eddy or channel seems best to help it onward. 
Without the glimmer of feeling to impel in the interest of 
its own satisfaction, the movement would tend nowhere 
and toward no gain — with as much probability of drifting 
back to the starting-place as of keeping onward. With 
feeling as stimulus, and sentient gain at every step, pro- 
gress somewhere is inevitable. The growing needs of 
the growing organism determine the somewhere — deter- 
mine the especial type of evolution for each species, 
physically and psychically. 

Nature's selection, and reproduction, and added nurture 
of all advance, would mean nothing if it were but the aid 
and preservation merely of organs and function with the 
sensibility omitted. The advantageous can only mean 
advantage to the sentient natures which enjoy and profit 
by it. Otherwise it would be as reasonable to talk of 
improvements, gains, and advantages to stocks and stones. 

No organism could make a decided growth in structure 
if corresponding functions were not also evolved. If the 
supply of proper nutrition had been generally left to the 
blind seeking of incompetent co-operative feeling, the odds 
against finding the adapted material at the right times 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 375 

would be immense. One guidance, one impelling sen- 
tient instinct was imperative. Even the Portuguese man- 
of-war is impelled to arm and equip its special " providers " 
though continuing but one closely composite organism. 
Every tree assigns this function to its roots and, in a greatly 
modified sense, to its leaves. Every species on its first 
emergence from a mere assemblage of protoplasmic units 
begins its upward tendencies by providing for and favor- 
ing the special food gatherer. 

As the interests of one and all are fundamentally 
dependent upon the bringing in of recruits, this and the 
putting out of the non-competent are the first great dif- 
ferentiations in every organism ; and both of these func- 
tions lead directly to the differencing of adapted organs. 
The environment outside lends its moulding hand ; but 
without a something to mould, without organization 
already established to co-operate with, the correspondence 
between organic life and its surroundings would be as 
lacking of all real advance as co-operation between the 
rock and its environment. They also are in continuous ex- 
change of energies ; but wholly without either gain or loss. 

Our dominant mind is early put in charge of the com- 
missariat in the interest of the marching army. It is thus 
attached securely to the solid and more obviously material 
welfare of the organism. The sense of smell is akin to 
that of taste, both exclusively personal ; it tends at once 
to reject the harmful and to aid in the search after the 
needful. Among the lower animals, in many of whom 
the ability to follow a scent is simply amazing, this useful 
sense is most highly evolved ; and with it there is every- 
where evinced one directive instinct or instinct guided by 
responsive intelligence. 

Among mankind, the sense of smell partially lapses ; 
the retaining of it in too vigorous a condition would 
bring more discomfort than comfort and could be of little 
real value or utility. 



376 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

Instinct, as simple instinct, also lapses ; or rather it be- 
comes transformed into perception and selection ; into 
discrimination, comparison, and a generally broadened 
intelligence accompanied by more and more organic 
control. The instinct, the impulse, is still there, but it 
has become transformed by discrimination between the 
undesirable, the desirable, and the more, desirable. It is 
no longer the mere asking for something ; but the object 
becomes known in one and the same co-operative act with 
the subjective feeling. The mind has come into com- 
munication with another type of nutriment. It is no 
longer tensions with which it exclusively comes into com- 
munication and which it incorporates as organic workers : 
it is nourished now by incoming free motion which it 
utilizes, and which it can more freely adapt to its own 
behests since the free energies have no individuality and 
no fixed correlations of their own to be adapted and to 
compel perhaps undesirable modifications in the recipient. 

And yet they all come with characteristics of their own 
derived from the tensions which sent them out, modified 
en route by their modes of conveyance. Thus light, 
forwarded to the mind by the organ of vision, awakens one 
class of sensations ; sound, another ; and the free energy 
transmitted through the sense of contact or touch and 
the related connecting nerves, yet another. 

These three open routes for communication with the 
outer environment convey nothing except their special 
free motions, so that the sustenance derived from them is 
purely dynamic. Foods are not appropriated in reality 
until they have become fluid, and the atmospheric gases 
derived through respiration being gaseous, the organism 
utilizes nothing which is not very largely dynamic. Nev- 
ertheless the nutritive processes, including respiration, 
taste, and smell — the two last mainly accessories or pick- 
ets, on guard before the gates, — are all concerned with the 
introduction of material in which motions and tensions 






CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 377 

remain in alternate interchange. But the other three 
senses, and if we include the muscular sense there are 
four, are the alert purveyors of nothing but pure dynamic 
modes. 

Pressure comes, indeed, from tensions. We feel the 
weight of one body, the blow of another, the cut of a 
third, yet the responding nerves convey only the dy- 
namic effects, and in all similar cases the tensions remain 
outside. 

If we would get some conception of the comparative 
vibratory freedom of the liquid as compared with the 
solid state, we have only to remember that it requires as 
much heat to change a pound of ice into a pound of 
water at the same temperature as is required in raising a 
pound of water 80 ° in temperature. The so-called latent 
heat of water is not measurable by the thermometer be- 
cause it is not heat, but it is other modes of free motion 
represented by the liquid condition ; it is these freer 
modes which are ready to become utilized in active 
processes. 

Water, which acts so largely as a solvent, and as a loco- 
motive carrier of solids, is also taken up into the organic 
tissues, and it may have many parts to play about which 
as yet we know very little. But we do know that it is 
very extensively utilized in a great variety of organic 
functions. The experiments of Dr. Tanner and other 
fast-keeping devotees, who have lived for weeks upon 
water only, apparently indicate that in some very real 
sense it can be made to become a substitute nutrition. 

But what is nutrition? It is easy to answer. It is 
assimilated food, and as assimilated here means organized, 
it is added organized growth. But the physician explains, 
it is something which " keeps up the strength." Nutri- 
ment keeps the physical vigor " from running down " is 
another way of putting it. This means not only that the 
new substance becomes a corporate part of the organism, 



378 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

but also that the energy in the new substance is commu- 
nicated to and shared by the older tissues. Experience 
teaches the same lesson. We feel weak and we are weak 
from continued fasting. We are strengthened by a nutri- 
tive diet. A well-fed but not overfed man is stronger in 
every muscle and nerve than a partially starved man ; he 
can even see better, hear better, and respond more 
buoyantly to every outside influence. 

All this goes to show that the strength availed of is 
shared and utilized not only by the organic whole, as on 
the larger scale one co-operative system, but also that in 
some way it is utilized especially in the interest of the one 
mind which has taken to so large an extent the organic 
control and direction. It upbuilds and fortifies those 
parts of the system which are more directly appropriated 
to his use, as nerves and muscles. He himself can make 
use of the newly acquired vigor in forwarding his own 
exclusive purposes. He can knock another man down 
with his fist, walk his legs into weariness at a ten-mile 
stretch, or use up energy in the brain by reading any 
tough treatise on metaphysics and philosophy. In all 
these things he is complete sovereign so long as the 
organism is in normal working order. 

The working method of the whole will send an extra 
supply of nutrient to the exhausted member, and pro- 
vided he will keep nearly within the limits of established 
organic balance, the stronger may become the most used 
member, and the whole working equipoise will gradually 
adapt itself to the superior growth of the most exercised 
parts. This means that the heart, a tense muscle over 
which he has very little control, will pulsate in the interest 
of anything which he may choose, seconded by the vaso- 
motor system, over which he has as yet acquired but small 
direct influence. 

It means that the entire nutritive alliance system has 
practically covenanted to nourish every tissue specially 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 279 

appropriated to his direct service, provided he will first 
supply the raw material, both to his advantage individually 
and to that of the organism organically. Thus, indirectly, 
he gains the full benefit of the latter also. 

We may remark, in passing, that the working methods 
of the organic confederation closely approximate to those 
of all distinctively mental copartnerships. All sharing in 
that realm quickens both the giver and the receiver. An 
idea becomes magnified almost in proportion to the num- 
ber who have accepted it, so that each contributes some- 
thing of value to others and receives from them in turn, 
while no one loses anything by communicating it to 
others. So in organic co-operations, because one part of 
the system is particularly favored, the others are not 
harmed, but on the whole benefited, because every part is 
dependent upon every other, and must share in the ad- 
vance, provided a normal equilibrium is maintained. 
With starvation imminent, over-nutrition in one direction 
might do only harm. Where all action is reciprocal and 
supplies abundant, so far from an antagonism from any 
part of the system, or from the offspring which becomes 
temporarily a working part of itself in the same equi- 
librated rhythm, an added strength is the legitimate 
outcome both to parent and child, and to every part 
of every tissue. 

Because the moon and the other planets are in motion, 
is not a good reason for supposing that any of them are 
subtracting from the earth's motion. Each body con- 
tributes towards the rhythmic stability of all the others. 
The solar system belongs to the static order of co-opera- 
tions, yet the quickening at any part of any revolution is 
responded to everywhere else in a definite ratio for each 
part. In organic moving equilibrium, with advance per- 
haps in several simultaneous directions, the whole system's 
continuous balance is yet perfectly necessitated. Ad- 
vance anywhere means advance everywhere, but also 



380 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

failure and retrogression anywhere mean commensurate 
loss everywhere. 

The system must be regarded as a coworking balanced 
whole far more than any inorganic mass, inasmuch as free 
motion is much more widely distributed in its co-opera- 
tions than tensions; and an organism is pre-eminently 
the recipient and utilizer of the dynamic modes. Hence 
although the mind and the tissues which it most com- 
mands receive the lion's share of nutrition and other 
forces, all the rest of the organism is actually advantaged 
thereby. 

Nutrition, then, is a literal, actual strengthening of the 
organism quite as much as it is the addition of newly 
organized matter. It strengthens both by helping to 
free the system from tensions whose free motion has 
been already redistributed, and by adding of its own 
abundant free modes to the general store. 

If this is true with the ordinary nutrients, how much 
more then of the purely dynamic forces received through 
the special senses ? There, so far as we are able to judge, 
the soma of the one conscious mind is or may be the 
direct and only direct recipient. I see, I hear, I feel the 
hand clasp or the blow ; and if the sensation is pleasur- 
able the whole organism receives a new stir and quick- 
ening because of it. It is I myself who am in communi- 
cation with the outer world by the help of the sense 
organs. While directly I know nothing about the circu- 
lation of the general nutrients, nor anything concerning 
the energy transmission by the nerves, nor of the somatic 
share in the process, yet the proper feeling rises in 
quick response. 

Let us suppose that our highly favored motion- 
feeling potentiality is placed at the principal node of 
active equilibration for many partial distinct and differ- 
entiated organic processes. Then, as its atomic centre 
receives and redistributes all motion internal to the atomic 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 38 1 

system itself, so, in this position, unless a diversion is 
made in other directions, it now receives and redistributes 
all modificatio?is of its primary rhythm caused by the 
organic co-operations. 

It will be seen that there are two sorts of equilibrated 
positions — those which are made by the counterbalancing 
of tensions and those made by the coming together of 
equal or balanced free motions. When tensions are in 
equipoise, if they belong to the inorganic modes, there 
may be very little interco-operation between the bal- 
anced sides. But in the organism, with its more dynamic 
processes, the nodes of mingled tensions and motions, 
are, as we have seen, the axes for the new vigorous 
growths. This is the type of organic equilibrium which 
appeals to sensation and which has stood as the repre- 
sentative of its class, very much as visible motion has 
been made to represent the class-motion. 

Neutral points of this kind are favorable to the aggre- 
gative or inorganic type of growth, and must have very 
much to do not only with shaping the forms of single 
crystals, but still more with the formation of tree-like 
crystalline growths — the branches shooting out from such 
neutral points and so helping in the maintenance of the 
general symmetry. But in such inorganic increase the 
matrix is a solution from which the added substance is 
deposited, generally in a rigid solid state ; and from that 
time there is very little dynamic communication between 
the parts. The static equilibrium is maintained as a con- 
tinuous stress. 

The organic nodes, also formed by the balance of ten- 
sions, still continue to be dynamically co-operative to 
such an extent that new growths starting from the 
neutral points absorb the freer modes and slough off the 
equivalent tensions ; so that the growth is both an inter- 
nal and an ever reinvigorating process. But as the 
equilibrium is chiefly that of balanced tensions, the 



382 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

pivotal position must generally arise at the places where 
the different atomic vibrations meet from opposed direc- 
tions ; and no one atom is more concerned in the redis- 
tribution of directed energy than any other ; and no one 
is a recipient of more dynamic modes than any of the 
others, since the very conditions of the case require 
balanced co-operation. 

But free motions in equipoise, typical in every ultimate 
atom, are never at rest. The centre of the system is its 
neutral point or position of redistribution. If its energy, 
then, is largely dynamic, or if it receives free modes from 
without, it is in a position to redistribute these as freely 
as it is itself the recipient. As a position of equilibrium, 
it is not a point favorable to new physical growths ; but 
favorable to new modifications and to the inauguration of 
new sentient activities. Exactly this position we assume 
to be the one occupied by the governing mind in every 
higher organism. It is not the nutritive centre of the 
organism ; it is the dynamic centre of all distinctively 
dynamic co-operations. 

Light, and sound, and warmth, and every mode of 
force which comes from kinds and degrees of physical 
contact and resistance, and the free energy in tasting and 
smelling, and the free energy started into activity by the 
viscera generally, are all brought to the one living con- 
sciousness ; and brought to it, as we hold, through the 
active co-operation of its physical soma. There is much 
evidence also that it is the only atom which occupies, or 
which can be supposed to occupy, this pre-eminently 
leading position in each of the higher organisms. 

Any three-, or five-, or many-atomed chemical molecule, 
whose centre of gravity coincides with the atomic centre 
of the one atom about which all the others are grouped, 
is also the dynamic centre of the whole molecule ; so far 
as the molecule as a system has any dynamic equipoise. 
But what opportunity has an ordinary chemical molecule 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 383 

for the active interchange of energies outside of the 
established molecular rhythms? The united vibrators 
are concerned only or mainly with each other. The free 
vibrators exchange free modes with their environment; 
but the reactions arise chiefly from their own atomic 
axes, since otherwise the whole molecule would be 
shaken into dissociation. Besides, the freest vibrators 
of such a molecule, being themselves partially retracted 
and thus but very limitedly free, might become greatly 
elongated because of received free modes without having 
yet gained their normal state or requiring molecular re- 
adjustment. 

Light penetrates but a very little way into any sensible 
mass. Heat travels inward by conduction ; but heat only 
serves to proportionately loosen the receiving tensions. 
This grade of heat is not free energy in its most active 
sense ; it is the activity which is converted into tension 
during every vibration and reconverted into motion with 
the return beat. The added heat prolongs the vibrations 
and becomes transformed into tension at a greater dis- 
tance from the atomic centre than a less amount of a 
dynamic mode would be ; it also quickens the rate of 
outflow, the time remaining a constant ; but there is no 
known transmission of energy to any dense inorganic 
mass centre, unless the substance is transparent to the 
special energy in transit. Then the free motion passes 
through and is gone. When the transparency is perfect, 
it " leaves not a wrack behind." 

But semi-fluid protoplasm, with its organic mode of 
growth effected by the utilization of free motion and 
the rejection of the practically dead tensions, is a con- 
stant trafficker in a great variety of energies. Any colloid 
molecule with an atomic centre of gravity would transfer 
motion from all sides to the same centre, and if this con- 
dition of things remained unchanged the centre of the 
gravitative pull would be also the centre of free motion 



384 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

push. But because the bringing in of new elements and 
the putting out of old ones is forever changing both the 
tense and the free nodes, no one atom is able to remain 
long in this important position. It is forced out of 
it by the nature of organic process as an essential pro- 
gression. 

Nevertheless the progression as a whole must be a 
moving equilibrium, not necessarily about a fixed centre ; 
but certainly about one continuously maintained motion 
centre. The solid support of the earth, given to the 
organism, makes its great centre of gravity that of the 
earth itself ; so that it is only what may be called a lateral 
centre of gravity which needs to be locally maintained — 
a fact which explains much of the apparent want of 
symmetry in many bodies, organic and inorganic. 

But the node of equilibrated motions, including those 
of organic processes of all sorts, whether it does or does 
not coincide with the gravitative or tension centre, must 
remain actively influential. We change the centre of 
gravity in any body by lifting it high into the air ; the 
free motion of lifting modifies the strain of the tensions. 
In an analogous way the free motion processes within the 
organism, by their co-operations with the original centre 
of the organism, lift it into a higher realm than that of 
physical weight. The embryo central unit, in the pro- 
gress of its organic evolution, has been carried up to the 
high seat ; but it continues to act in direct and indirect 
co-operation in every organic process. 

But we leave theorizing and appeal to the facts. The 
nerves of sensation can all be traced from the periphery 
to the brain, and from all the inner surfaces and organs 
to the brain ; and the motor nerves can be traced from 
the brain to the surfaces and other tissues. There are 
the more local centres, the nerve cells, in the spinal cord 
and scattered in many other parts of the great nerve 
plexus. But not one of these has more than a very 



CONSCIOUS MIND AND CO-OPERATIVE ORGANISM. 385 

remote connection with any of the special organs of 
sense. We have no evidence that there is more than one 
self-consciousness in any organism. Every supposed 
indication that there is can be better explained in other 
ways ; and there are many negative reasons for disbeliev- 
ing that more than one mind can be evolved by the help 
of one co-operative system of changes — however complex 
and differentiated in modes the sub-processes may have 
become. 

The physical reciprocities, impelled by felt impulse, 
modified by widening co-operations of various and vari- 
able kinds, have progressively originated a wonderful 
complexity of endlessly interweaving changes. Within 
the arch which locks all these into one magnificent 
dependency is the self-conscious individuality. All the 
windows and doors open and close at its option. Energy 
supplies of all kinds are brought rapidly at its bidding, 
and its multitudes of mandates are carried out with 
mathematical faithfulness. 

Like all royal inheritors it was born to this greatness 
far more essentially than it has helped to achieve its 
position for itself. Yet as its opportunities are boundless, 
there are no actual limits to its possible achievements. 
It must simply learn the nature of the material with 
which it is destined to co-operate, and work in line with 
the helps and hindrances which have ranged themselves 
about it on every hand. They are all subservient to its 
bidding ; yet all must remain faithful to their own powers 
and limitations, and their service must be in line with all 
co-operative methods, and their mutually dependent 
limitations. 

This is the general outlook. If we can gain some 
insight into the means which have evolved at once its 
own mental growth and the high physical estate through 
which it was secured, represented not only by the organic 
total, but equally by its degrees of correspondence with 



3 86 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 



the external environment, we may gain at the same time 
some intelligent outlook into the limitless possibilities of 
its future. An evolution of this ever increasingly co- 
operative kind, it becomes cumulatively evident, is not 
destined to irretrievable disastrous overthrow. 




THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 

The future mind becomes the nucleus of its nascent 
organism by no knowledge, wish, or volition of its own. 
The mole, the elephant, and the man each takes its lead- 
ing role in the embryo, which shall grow to a small or to 
a large quadruped, or which shall grow to the form of a 
human being rather than to that of a free swimming medusa 
or a clam, perhaps not because of having already acquired 
superior instincts, but because environment, mechanical, 
parental, and other influences have guided it to the posi- 
tion and the destiny which at first it unwittingly assumes. 
Neither mole nor man can have at the time a glimmer of 
real intelligence. It seems even possible that if they 
could be changed as to all surroundings the future 
of each might become that of the other. As to that, we 
have not, and it is not probable that we shall soon have, 
any certain knowledge. 

But once made the equipoised centre of the most active 
organic processes, all is changed. Every incoming free 
motion is brought freely to its service from any and all 
directions. 

Its pre-eminent physical function at once becomes that 
of the redistribution of received free motion. The 
somatic modifications arising from all co-operations, or- 
ganic and inorganic, must be either passed onward by 
simple transference, radiated on all sides, or in some 
other way utilized for its own or the general benefit. 
Every surrounding particle must co-operate, seconding 

387 



388 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

its action not only in the maintenance of organic equi- 
librium, but in the furtherance of any arising utilities. 
Every newly organized particle must come into active 
co-operation with the one complex rhythm, which is con- 
tinuously so maintained that the dominant mind-atom, 
under all conditions, remains the dynamic centre of all 
received and redistributed energies. 

Mentally it becomes quickened just in proportion to 
the amounts and kinds of energy brought to it and duly 
reacted upon through its participating soma. In these 
conditions it is as helpless as to the kind of mental de- 
velopment which it will start out to gain as any atom in 
an inorganic body, but sensibility of some kind must rap- 
idly increase, because its dynamic modifications must 
rapidly increase. Its dynamic position and function are 
ancestral inheritances. Its earliest unified organism is 
largely predetermined by heredity and its psychic evolu- 
tion must begin along the already established parental 
lines. 

This class of suggestions call out at once some vague 
apprehension of possible complicated but efficient means 
of keeping each individual true to its own species and 
closely akin to the parental characteristics. All relations 
being continuously reciprocal, whatever individuality can 
become the pivotal node of the free energies with which 
every organism so freely deals, must become mentally ad- 
vanced, although its coworkers remain at the foot of the 
ladder or drift back again to a more outer darkness. 

The distinction between a compound system's centre 
of gravity — the equilibrating node established largely 
through the co-operation of balanced tensions — and the 
corresponding though greatly differenced position where 
freer modes become counteractive should be clearly real- 
ized. In inorganic partnerships, when the dynamic nodes 
are formed, they are either perpetually shifting or else 
they are managed and directed by human ingenuity ; as 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 389 

when light or heat are concentrated at a focus which is not 
necessarily or probably coincident with any atomic focus. 
Some gems, as the diamond, and many crystalline forms 
can focus light for themselves, redistributing it by flashing 
it back at a direct or a modified angle of incidence. 
There has always been a tendency to apply metaphors to 
this class of phenomena and to imagine an under- 
lying sensibility. 

But any dynamic node may or may not be coincident 
with one individual centre of both dynamic and static 
forces, as the centre of every ultimate rhythmic atom 
must be. If it is not such a centre, then the free motion 
concentrated at one point from any divergent source may 
be variously redistributed, utilized, and transformed ; all 
co-operating atoms will feel its vivifying influence as it 
moves to and fro — as probably in all other energy trans- 
ference. But no one atom need receive a larger share 
than each of the others or be more mentally quickened 
by this form of co-operation than it would be by combus- 
tion or any other temporary but intensely active state. 

According to theory, every such dynamic exigency 
must be attended by sensation, pleasurable or painful, 
though under ordinary conditions memory could never 
verify such isolated experiences. 

It appears, then, that three kinds of nodes produced 
by joint static and dynamic co-operation are possible — in 
two of which free motion is dominant. A mind may be 
thought of as associated with any node of equilibrated 
tensions. If the dominant mind began its organic reac- 
tions in such a position, the progressive methods of organic 
growth have moved it onward with the moving node 
formed by oppositely directed dynamic modes. Obvi- 
ously, if its own axis remains thus the central position of 
balanced or dynamic forces, the soma must react and re- 
distribute all energies brought to it ; and the quickened 
mind must respond with increased, new, and almost 



390 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

continuously differentiated sensations. It is itself the in- 
direct perpetual axis, the distributing node of ever balanc- 
ing activities. The organism's co-operating, freer modes 
customarily travel along its own vibratory paths, co-oper- 
rating with its individual vibrations, both when they are 
incoming and outgoing. 

It follows that any conditioned individuality so situated 
must begin a special and distinct sentient evolution, and 
it must simultaneously increase its control over many co- 
operative organic processes and over the growing and 
structure-forming tissues. Its mental development will 
be a development after the type of its own species, as 
assuredly as the bodily growth will follow in the ancestral 
lines. The immature mind can only continue under the 
joint, blind, somewhat vacillating direction of the united 
sentient and insentient coworking aspects of organic 
increase. 

We have already tried to show that organic working 
co-ordinations make all functions, however specialized, as 
much or more intimately, the parts of one general process, 
as the different motions of a set of wheels and pulleys 
make but parts of one working method. In a loom, the 
moving beam which beats up the fabric into firmness, the 
rise and fall of the more delicate complex parts which 
regulate the pattern to be woven, the warp which has 
already taken its assigned place, and even the solid frame- 
work of the loom itself, are all as essentially co-operative 
in the forming web as is the moving shuttle with its pro- 
gressively introduced thread of woof. The motive power 
is also progressively introduced. 

Our mothers called the added weaving thread, the 
filling. This filling and its introduction may be com- 
pared to the general nutritive process of an organism, 
and the motive power to the outside dynamic stimulus 
without which all progress would come to a speedy 
cessation. 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 39 1 

In most organic explanations of process, the great 
source to which we have looked for supplies has been the 
tangible foods ; and more latterly the oxygen of respira- 
tion, which is now held to be at least in part organically 
incorporated — therefore a genuine food. But our claim 
is that the ultimate utility of all food is to be found in 
the dynamic help that it gives to the real progress which 
is achieved through organization. That real progress, 
that actual gain, is not material, but mental. We also 
hold that the energies introduced through the special 
senses, by their more subtle co-operations within the 
organism as well as external to it, do their own special 
and indispensable share toward the orderly evolution of 
every mind. 

This is another example in which physical explanation, 
which of necessity began upon the sensible plane, has not 
yet shaken off the earlier prepossessions. The tangible 
body and its sustenance is made to play much too large 
a part in human evolution, and even in the evolution of 
the lower animal world. Curiously enough, to the plant 
has been assigned very great gain from co-operation with 
imponderable energies of a kind which have not been 
recognized as equally beneficent to animal organic pro- 
cess. The advantage is with the animal. 

We recognize that seeing is dependent upon light, 
hearing upon sound, feeling upon the interchange of 
energies derived through pressures from contact or from 
interchanges of heat with the environment. Prof. 
Crookes has shown that sunlight is an efficient force in 
its action upon inanimate matter ; and yet the really im- 
portant part which the large variety of free motions must 
play in all organic economy has been very little and never 
very practically studied except in its more immediate effects 
upon the special senses and their reactionary response. 

Because the plant whitens and dies without sunlight, 
it becomes evident that light co-operates with the energies 



392 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

in the plant in the formation of the green tissue of the 
leaves. But what happens when light is transmitted by 
the optic nerve to the brain ? The sensation of seeing is 
in some way excited. There is often the feeling that it 
is light which produces vision, but it is light co-operative 
with the organism, especially with the eye and its con- 
nections ; and unless the mind and its soma become co- 
operative also, though the light still falls upon the eye 
there is no visual sensation. This can only mean that in 
some way the mind itself must become actively co-opera- 
tive in all sensation. It is active, by hypothesis, only 
through its own soma ; the feeling either following the 
physical modes or giving them directed modifications. 
But as the sentient side of every process by which it be- 
comes cognizant, the somatic energizing, direct or indi- 
rect, must be efficiently co-ordinated both with the feeling 
and with all of the physical connections. 

Thus all sensations are co-operative ; though the sensa- 
tion, like the motion side of itself, can pertain to only 
one individual. But the sensation arises through co- 
operation in a sense as literal as jumping or walking does. 
Every change is equally a correlated change, though the 
nature of the correlations differs as the changes differ in 
kinds as well as in amounts. 

Light, then, is the energy co-operative in all vision. 
Sound actively relates its objective vibrations to the 
subjective sensation of hearing — not directly, but indi- 
rectly by exchanging free motion with the mind's somatic 
vibrations, upon the same principle by which a colder and 
a warmer body exchange heat ; as two clouds differently 
electrified exchange free electricity. The kinds and 
the amounts of exchange may differ widely ; but the 
underlying principle of free-motion exchanges is every- 
where the same. The source of pressure and resistance 
is always recognized as resulting from equal action and 
reaction ; but it is no more so than tasting, smelling, per- 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND, 393 

ceiving, thinking, choosing, and every other mental ex- 
perience. 

We are literally correlated existences as much in our 
mental experiences as in eating and breathing. There 
must be food to eat and air to breathe. So there must be 
objective light, sound, odor, and resistance before the cor- 
responding subjective sensations can originate. The 
higher intellectual processes are more remote from the 
outside stimulations with which they co-operate ; but we 
have many evidences that there is active actual co-opera- 
tion all the same. The organism is a congeries of accu- 
mulators in which free energy is availably stored up for 
later appropriation. 

Thus the animal economy is as much more benefited by 
co-operative free motions than the vegetable economy, as 
its processes are more active than those of the vegetable. 
The higher and the more co-operative the organic struc- 
ture, the more efficiently and extensively is it able to 
utilize the freer modes of motion in behalf of the one 
conscious sensibility. Just here is the highest example of 
the many advantages to be derived from organization, with 
its everywhere more and less remote but always active 
reciprocities. Its initiation and its motive is sensibility, 
but its processes all become co-ordinated in the supreme 
interest of the one directive mind. The composite organ- 
ism, loosely put together physically, can originate no large 
mental growth anywhere. Its most differenced functions 
are all on the low plane of an almost purely responsive 
sensation, for if the first organism must have begun the 
organic co-operation de novo, all the later ones known to 
us are only following the ancestral lead. Not until a 
distinctively directive intelligence — intelligence largely 
blind and wholly instinctive it may be, yet an actual 
dawning discrimination — is able to lead the organic 
functions as a co-operative whole, measurably in the 
direction of its personal desires, can any organism begin 



394 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

to advance to the dignity of one self-regulated system of 
activities. 

Thus the one rapidly advancing mind is as great a bene- 
factor to its coworkers collectively, perhaps as they 
collectively are contributives towards its advancement. 
At least no organic mind, when self-conscious, has ever 
thought of itself except as one and indivisible, until forced 
to do so in order to explain some of the difficulties of the 
situation ; and there is no advanced organism which is not 
obviously under but one self-gratifying guidance as to all 
of its external movements and the desires which lead to 
them. 

Hence free energies, received at every special sense and 
less conspicuously received by every organic surface, sub- 
serve the same essential ends with the denser foods — they 
introduce dynamic modes to the service of the organism. 
But the several sense organs, by means of their connecting 
nerves, are more directly related to the one conscious 
mind ; yet where the mind is otherwise engaged, the com- 
municated energy is sent through other connections to an 
adapted reflex centre and redistributed from there — the 
mind and its soma being saved from any active participa- 
tion. Thus the purely dynamic modes are pre-eminently 
utilized by the consciousness, as the tensions are chiefly 
utilized in the service of the nutritive system, though 
the two interpenetrate and co-operate throughout the 
organism. 

One may argue the possibility that every organ and 
even every cell may be supposed to have one central mind 
rapidly advancing in sensibility, because it is the nucleus of 
a group of closely associated energies, and hence is the 
natural recipient of their changing modes. In such con- 
ditions, if they exist, the central unit would derive all of 
the supposed sentient benefit. But the conditions of 
organic growth are such that every cell is believed to 
frequently break up by subdivision when the equilibrat- 



THE EVOLUTION- OF MIND, 395 

ing atom must lose the favored position with its oppor- 
tunities. 

But organic cells belong rather to the nutritive system 
than to those tissues concerned primarily with free 
energies. Modes of equilibrium would therefore be 
positions of balanced tensions rather than nodes made by 
the meeting of free motions oppositely migrating. Be 
this as it may, there is no sufficient evidence that more 
than one mind ever consciously assumes guidance in any 
of the higher organisms. Certainly only one acquires a 
general guidance of many co-ordinated actions, or is able 
to indicate that it has attained to a correlated experience 
which includes a past, present, and future — presumably 
related to one persistent personality. 

The claim is that at every stage of co-ordinated organic 
growth, while there is a distinct centre of tensions — the 
centre of gravity which is variable within certain limits, — 
there is also one steadily maintained dynamic node 
around which all co-operative free motions are equilibrated, 
towards which these active energies all tend, and at which 
they all arrive when not sent in other directions by inter- 
posing obstacles. In evidence of this assumption we 
propose to give various corroborative facts from time to 
time. 

We put sugar in the mouth, the taste is that of sweet- 
ness ; vinegar, we get the sensation always related to an 
acid. A given musical note is sounded — with like 
conditions, the resulting sensation is precisely identical 
with a like past sensation. We look at a tree in full leaf 
from a given point of view — it has to our sensations the 
same size, the same form, the same greenness and beauty 
that it brought to our realizing sensibility an hour or a 
day ago. We press against a piece of cold iron, we feel 
the chill, we feel the hardness, the peculiar resistance with 
which it pushes back ; we lift it, it has the same sensible 
weight which other things equal it always seems to have ; 



396 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

there is no possibility of our doubting that, so long as all 
of the conditions, external and internal, are identical, the 
sensations will be, must be, identical. 

In the light of many similar facts can we disbelieve that 
in each case actual copartnerships are established between 
the object and the subject ? The sensation is the neces- 
sary active response to its objective cause. But the 
causes must be actively transmitted modes and quantities 
of motion. Granted the onflow of reflected modes of en- 
ergy from each object, adapted to the sense through which 
it is to be actively conveyed to the vibratory structure of 
the soma, setting up within that like modes actually com- 
municated to it and causing it to react, then a correlated 
quality and degree of feeling must attend each vibratory 
mode provided feeling is but the living or sentient 
expression, the experience-aspect of that mode of motion. 
The two, being but the conscious and the mechanical 
sides of the same reaction, wax and wane together as 
inseparably as color and form unitedly manifest the 
same bodily changes. 

The infant, on first opening its eyes, receives a visual 
greeting from every object about it. Its ears vibrate 
to a myriad of sounds. Everything which it tastes, 
touches, smells, makes acquaintance with in any way 
whatever, helps to establish its special communications in 
some way with the Ego of consciousness. Then, as 
personal feeling follows or rather keeps pace with the 
personal motion, in whatever extensive processes a mind- 
matter individuality may become co-operative, with the 
extensive changes, arise the correlated intensive changes. 

Before birth the nascent mind must correspondingly 
gain an access of sensibility with each new physical modi- 
fication. The growth of an organism is not merely adding 
like sensation to like sensation — all of the same kind, as 
in most inorganic co-operations. Our position is that, in 
every addition to any organic body, the mere increase of 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 397 

co-operative quantity, by increasing the quantity of 
somatic reaction, increases also the conscious feeling in 
the Ego — it being the great organic receiver of activities. 

Still more, any structural advance, parentally initiated, 
tending towards the growth of special organs and their 
differentiated functions, by introducing before unknown 
physical modifications, all of which tend Ego-ward and 
correspondingly modify the somatic activity, introduces 
also the corresponding differentiated increase of the per- 
sonal sensibility. 

The co-operating host of less favored individualities 
may perhaps gain in quality of sensibility, and must in 
quantity, as feeling is an accumulation of a persistent 
type. It stands related to other feelings in a duration 
which is simply an abiding, an endless present. A mode 
of motion arises and subsides in a measurable time. The 
feeling which accompanies it does the same ; but as the 
feeling is experience, is a change of the living sensibility, 
while the motion is not directly cognized as motion or 
felt as such by the sensibility, the mode of motion is not 
conserved. But the feeling can be recalled into conscious- 
ness. Motion in the aggregate is a changeless total, of 
constitutional necessity. Feeling is an ever increasing 
total, of equal constitutional necessity. Feeling pertains 
to itself alone, because it alone is the record of a per- 
sistent cognitive power. The motion does not enter into 
direct personal experience as motion ; it enters there only 
as feeling, and as feeling it remains a personal possession. 
The feeling can recall itself into consciousness by the 
help of other modes of motion, but it can never recall 
any motion into direct consciousness, since no motion as 
a change in space has ever entered there. It is as need- 
ful to distinguish between the subjective feeling which we 
call motion and objective motion, as to distinguish between 
sound subjective and objective. The objective is forever 
external to consciousness, and yet forever a part of the 



398 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

co-operation in which consciousness takes its own distinct 
part. 

These distinctions can be better realized at a later stage 
of the discussion. Because organic process involves 
much change of workers, as well as of work done, only- 
such individuals as remain long in active copartnership 
and in the exercise of varied functions are so placed as to 
be largely helped to the increase of personal sensibility. 
That the Ego of consciousness is so placed that its posi- 
tion ensures its organic permanence and necessitates the 
increase of sensibility so long as the organism remains 
largely dynamic in its methods, we have tried to show. 
These conditions applying as really to the embryo as to 
the maturer organism, a rapid mental growth from the 
first becomes a necessity. 

Also it must be an orderly growth in accordance with 
changeless law. Much has been said of the different 
subjective effects, apparently produced by the same 
objective cause. But no single cause produces any 
sensible effect. Some of the same food will taste sweet 
at one mouthful, but not sweet a few moments later if we 
have eaten something much more sweet in the interval. 
The same mildly warm water may feel warm to one hand 
and cold to the other at the same time, provided the one 
hand has been previously chilled and the other previously 
heated. But actual modes of energy, though started in equal 
quantities from the food at the different times by a like 
process, and from the tepid water at the same instant, are 
yet transmitted to the soma under very unequal conditions. 

The transformations which equal amounts of motion 
will undergo in either of the two cases considered, will of 
necessity be extremely different. In mechanics we have 
similar examples of unlike results from like so-called 
causes — in reality but very partial causes. 

Of two wheels, otherwise exactly alike, but the one in 
rapid motion and the other at rest, if an equal moderate force 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 399 

be applied to each (the other propelling force being with- 
drawn), the one already turning rapidly may begin at 
once to move less quickly, but the wheel at rest will be set 
in motion. Such results are very closely paralleled by 
hands in different conditions immersed in the same tepid 
water. Somatic vibratory modes must presumably be as 
much or more differentiated physically in the above 
supposed reactions resulting in unlike sensations of sweet- 
ness. There is not a like initiatory cause. Nor is it 
simply the soma reacting from unlike modes. All of the 
transmitting vibratory lines beginning in very different 
states become quite diversely modified. The sensations 
are the outcome of the whole extended process. 

In the inorganic kingdom, radiated heat in its outward 
progress is absorbed by an adapted body a trifle colder 
than the body radiating ; but is transmitted by the same 
intervening body, provided it chances to be a trifle hotter 
than the body radiating. No one can fail to see the close 
analogy between facts like these, where, among physical 
energies when sensibility may be left out of the account, 
with an equal initiatory cause, the effect seems to be 
reversed by explainable mechanical action, and the trans- 
mission of modes of energy by the special senses when 
sensibility is involved. The soma must, it seems, become 
variously affected under the different conditions. 

As the feeling is but living sensibility responsive to its 
proper somatic action, a feeling of heat and a feeling of 
cold therefore may be simultaneously recognized, both 
starting from the same source objectively. Everything 
outside of the soma itself is objective, and the co-operating 
factors along the different routes produce the differenti- 
ated modifications. 

Hence, like causes, in their entirety, produce absolutely 
like effects psychical and physical. The mind must develop 
exactly the kind and amount of sensibility which co- 
operation with its environment brings to it. A sala- 



400 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

mander develops into a salamander in form and in feeling. 
If well fed, he can become large and plump, if half 
starved he cannot be strong physically ; yet with a some- 
what higher structural attainment — not impossible under 
painful conditions — he may become mentally even more 
alert than the majority of his kind. But his attainments, 
modified by present conditions, are largely determined 
by the hereditary lines which have been forecast for him 
by his ancestors. Nervous systems are networks of 
such lines. 

As one non-organic body retains available highways for 
the unchanged transmission of red light, another for the 
green light, and still another for the yellow, so the sala- 
mander receives the kind of physical sense impressions 
which have become established for his kindred in all past 
generations. The insect with its swift flight receives and 
profits by quite another order of sensations ; and the 
mammal, by yet another — by a more varied and complex 
type. These highways of nerves are laid down in a 
definite order of relationship among themselves — an order 
congenitally determined from age to age by the kind of 
co-operation which natural selection was enabled to 
establish between the inner and the outer relations of the 
species. Nature is prompted to conserve every advantage ; 
but until self-consciousness is reached, until the rational 
mind begins to direct its own processes, she can only 
blunder on as stupidly and as slowly as she has done 
during the long immeasurable past. 

But when desire is no longer the common blind 
instinct shared by an associated multitude without 
thought, but a weak groping towards a direct gratifica- 
tion ; when desire becomes strong feeling with some 
recognized background of experience to guide it towards 
the end it seeks, it begins to modify and diversify even 
the ancestral lines of development. A man is vastly more 
unlike his parents than a beetle or a mud turtle are unlike 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 401 

theirs. Men are differentiated from their progenitors by 
a thousand personal traits, which make the individual of 
his species almost worthy to be counted as a variety each 
by himself. Intelligence, gaining command of Nature's 
productions, working in accord with the laws and learning 
the broader use of indirect methods in a co-operative 
furtherance of desires, can achieve more of material and 
mental, personal and social progress in a decade than 
natural selection would accomplish along the same evolu- 
tionary lines in centuries. 

So much more effective is self-conscious mind as utilizer 
and director of Nature's mechanical and non-reasoning 
forces than these forces themselves are with no guidance 
but constitutional activities which have not yet gained 
rational direction. With the survival of the fittest, and 
heredity, evolution is assured. With progress socially 
achieved, evolution is incomparably accelerated. Hence 
the vast importance of studying the methods which pro- 
mote the rise and progress of mind. 

Our first claim is that sensation, which is exclusively 
personal or subjective, arises only in rigid correlation 
with individual somatic modifications. Feeling is the 
sensibility which is in and of the special mode of motion. 
The rise of either necessitates the two phases of the one 
related change. This change in all of its aspects is the 
individual share taken actively in some process effected 
co-operatively between the individual and its environment. 
Hence, whatever the individual share in any process, so 
precisely, in degree and in kind, is the evolved sensibility ! 
No other feeling can attend just that mode of motion. 

This is as true of every living creature, of every con- 
ditioned individuality, as of man who is able to test and 
verify it by appealing to the facts. The omnivorous 
swine may have small appreciation of gastronomic differ- 
ences between cake and pickles as agreeable articles of 

diet. If so, it is because modes of motion are so far 

26 



402 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

transformed by the swinish nerves, that the somatic 
response is not greatly differentiated. A horse is far 
more appreciative of the dainty differences between sugar 
and vinegar. The carnivora and the herbivora have 
differenced nervous structures adapted to the nutriment 
upon which they subsist respectively. Doubtless these 
adaptations have gradually arisen from repeated action 
and reaction between structure and nutrition ; but the 
individual sensibility has modified and increased propor- 
tionately. The personal feeling arises only with the 
somatic correlation in active co-operation. 

The degrees of feeling which attend unlike quantities 
of motion are really differenced qualities of feeling, and 
not merely more and less feeling. In other words, a 
feeling is always a quality whether it is excited by much 
or little of some quantity. But there is increase of inten- 
siveness with all dynamic increase. We know that a good 
deal of sugar gives us much more taste of sweetness than 
a small quantity, and that a tree near at hand looks larger 
than one far off. This can only be because more energy 
is brought to us from the object in the one case than in 
the other. The reaction, physical and mental, is exactly 
co-ordinated with the objective quantity and mode. 

That the objective is not simply the sugar or the tree, 
is proved by our different reception of them when in 
different organic conditions. After an illness, sugar may 
no longer taste as sugar does to us in health ; and with 
inflamed eyes the tree may give us only the sensation of 
a blur upon the landscape. The object of sense and the 
organism are together included in the objective. So is 
the intervening atmosphere, since darkness or a fog will 
wholly blot out the tree so far as vision is concerned. 

Spencer's admirable term environment is comprehen- 
sive, but it may stand for a nominal surrounding unless 
something which is not environment, but the activity of 
the environment, enters into correspondence with the 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 403 

environed. A rock may be a part of the environment 
of a quadruped, yet its moulding effect upon structure 
and function would be inappreciable while the food upon 
which the animal feeds produces great modifications, 
physical and psychical. 

As it is the active co-operations with which we wish 
especially to deal in considering the relations of the con- 
scious mind to its environment, we propose to make use 
of the more dynamic term co-operant. The co-operant of 
the mind is that part of the environment with which at 
any given time the mind is in present active co-operation. 
Every thing external to the individual is its environment 
and may be its co-operant. 

The evolution of feeling, of mind, is literally dependent 
upon the associated activities of its co-operant. The 
modes of what may be called the inorganic subject 
are equally dependent upon those of its co-operant — its 
associate not-self, — which includes the remainder of the 
universal correlative being. But, as we have already said 
in effect, inorganic co-operation generally tends to check 
both active motion and emotion, and the closer the 
co-operation the more repressed become all dynamic 
modes. Hence in the internal economy of a stone or a 
clod there is manifested neither motion nor life, neither 
action nor feeling ; yet there must exist the same quantity 
of co-operation in any stone of a given weight and a 
living organism of the same weight ! 

Considerations like these compel us to attach the 
highest importance to the co-operative methods, to the 
kinds of co-partnerships which arise in the organic 
domain. The transfer of energy by a nerve may be 
vastly more important in its effects than the swing of the 
arm of a giant. The produced thought may have incal- 
culably more dynamic value than a blow powerful enough 
to fell even the giant himself. 

Everything then must depend upon the kinds of rela- 



404 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

tionships actively maintained between the dominant mind 
of any organism and its co-operant. 

Spencer's famous definition of life is beyond criticism, 
if to life and its evolution we attach the meaning evolution 
of personal sensibility ; and to correspondence between 
inner and outer relations, correspondence between the 
conscious Ego and its environment or co-operant. 

Whenever we take into account all conditions external 
to the Ego and regard them as combined cause, the sub- 
jective effect must then be the exact equilibrating equiv- 
alent of that cause. It is the true physical equivalent ; 
the feeling is but the living cognizance of the personal 
modifications. The cognizance does not include the 
physical effect ; it is the sentient effect only, given in the 
simple terms of the responsive sensibility. 

The study of the co-operant and its methods must be 
indirect. The conclusions arrived at by the mind are 
largely influential and of the nature of judgments ; but 
whenever any entire process is considered, objective cause 
and subjective effect being true working equivalents and 
active correlates, the conclusions will be reliable. They 
become accurate and positive knowledge. The only 
difficulty lies in one's being enabled to take into consid- 
eration any entire process conducted associately by the 
Ego and its co-operant. Both being able to take on 
almost infinitely various modes, the liability to exclude 
essentials and to include irrelevancies is evident and in 
practice is often extremely perplexing. The only remedy 
lies in testing and retesting the conclusion by varying 
the problem under so many different conditions that the 
flaws and misapprehensions will become evident and the 
conclusion be revised until there is no room for the 
further question of its accuracy. 

About the purely subjective feeling of any and every 
kind there can be no doubt. The feeling is as it is and it 
is real subjective experience. The question is : How far 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 405 

is any given feeling the precise correlate of exactly those 
modes of the co-operant to which we attribute it ? There 
is no claim that the subjective knowledge is like the object 
known. It is conceded that it is not. In the nature of 
the case it is not and cannot be even in the same domain 
of activities, since the one is a modification in space and 
the other in consciousness. The point is, Can the subject 
obtain a true consciousness, a real knowledge of the 
object — of its kind, its modes, its co-operations ? Is the 
subjective judgment a constitutional correlate and expo- 
nent of its objective cause ? When the conscious subject 
takes the initiative does it become true and actual cause 
of modifications in the co-operant which are the real corre- 
lates of its subjective modes ? 

These various queries, which are virtually only so many 
different aspects of one inquiry, we are disposed to think 
may be answered without qualification in the affirmative. 
At any rate, having stated the problem, we proceed to 
indicate the lines along which we are to look to find 
materials for its final solution. 

Most people, thinkers or otherwise, will be disposed to 
admit that the simplest sensations and their causes are 
true correlates; that objective sound waves and the sub- 
jective sensation in response, rise and fall together in 
related accord. The test of this is easy and always at hand. 
The high note gives the acute sensation, the low note 
awakes its deep and more solemn response. In a thousand 
ways the accurate correlation can be illustrated and veri- 
fied. The same is true of each of the other senses. The 
varying effects produced by different physical conditions, 
organic and extra-organic, can also be so fully investigated 
that a confirmed belief obtains that sensations and their 
causes are the objective and the subjective expressions of 
one and the same thing. 

The unity of the principal correlates is so obtrusively 
obvious that the masses have not discriminated between 



406 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

them but have been fully convinced that the sensation 
sound and the vibration sound are identical. So they are 
if we consider the process or co-operation in its entirety. 
But the feeling is one aspect of the process and the motion 
quite another aspect. The conscious Ego and indeed 
every other ego co-operating, if the theory is sustained, 
energizes in both aspects, the subjective and the objective. 
Each individuality is in perpetual opposition to its own 
co-operant. The difference between nascent minds and the 
self-conscious Ego is that their partnerships are largely 
static, and their part in mediating between the conscious 
mind and its object is either transient or so purely 
successive in kind that the sentient gain is only that of 
repetition. 

The ether of space, forever transmitting light, heat, or 
other modes of motion, though every vibration has its 
sentient side, can be but one endless repeating, intensively 
as extensively. So must it be with the transmitters sta- 
tioned along the special nerves of sensation. The important 
test correlation is between the Ego and its total co- 
operant. The nervous structure, and, indeed, the entire 
organism, is but the adapted medium of communication 
between the mind and the more remote objects to be 
studied and known. 

The organism has the most intimate union with the Ego, 
but it can have no more significant function as mediator 
between subject and object than the ether has as trans- 
mitting medium between the radiating sun and the 
recipient earth. Some form of dynamic energy is trans- 
mitted from the object, which becomes added dynamic 
action in the soma and the corresponding sensation in the 
consciousness. No one can fail to realize that the nerves 
of special sense are the transmitters of special modes. 
Sound may fall upon the nerves of the eyes ; they transmit 
no vibratory response ; they reject the sound waves as 
the ears reject the light vibration ; as an opaque body 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 407 

refuses to transmit the waves of light, though it may freely 
pass on the heat undulations to their destination. There 
is generally some absorption — perhaps by a transforma- 
tion into other modes. But, as we shall realize more and 
more clearly as the discussion progresses, while the organic 
availability is more various than that of any other trans- 
mitting medium, the analogies between the uses of the 
organism and other radiating bodies is very complete 
indeed. 

No finite mind can investigate its co-operant in all of its 
phases, can know any process in its remote co-operations 
except by taking note of it as continuous influencing 
energy — as, for example, the ceaseless action of gravity, of 
temperature, etc., with which all bodies are in coaction 
with more or less change in modes and results. One may 
make an especial study of these broader copartnerships ; 
but in the study of any special object, as ahorse, a tree, or 
of the way in which the sensation of sight is produced in 
the mind by the form of the horse or the tree, one is more 
directly concerned with one special group of co-operations. 
In other words we are compelled to as nearly abstract the 
one process to be known from all other processes as is 
possible ; and as nearly as may be to confine the atten- 
tion to that and its co-relations for the time, to the exclu- 
sion of everything else. 

Subsequently the processes must be mentally and if 
possible physically combined in as many different ways as 
is possible, that we may study the influence of each upon 
the other — testing them both by contrasts and similari- 
ties. In no other way can the mind attain to accurate 
and trustworthy conclusions. Even then the establish- 
ment of before unsuspected relations, through new objective 
and subjective dynamic co-operations, may compel a re- 
vision of opinions which had been most carefully tested 
and proved by the affirmations of the earliest testimony. 
We have repeatedly insisted that the earlier cognition is 



408 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

not false ; it is only inadequate. Inadequate it must be 
unless we reach Infinity. 

In this necessity, by which knowledge is forever widen- 
ing its foundations, the mind instinctively pursues a method 
which Nature herself has made a necessity. Neither is it 
simply that . the mind by the help of its organism, 
with its increase both in size and in structure, has 
secured a mental advancement which enables it to take 
part with a continually widening co-operant. That is but 
one side of the joint progression — the one side being an 
increase of feeling in consciousness while the other is a 
virtual progressive extending of the spatial correlations in 
the direction both of the larger and larger and also in that 
of the smaller and smaller. Space includes both the un- 
limitedly large and the unlimitedly minute, and knowledge 
moves both ways in its enlarging partnerships with an 
ever increasing co-operant. 

Nature first manifests to the immature mind her dis- 
tinct and apparently separate and independent sensible 
bodies. These can be appreciated through sight and 
touch by the animal and the child comprehensions. 
Nature's pebbles and grains of sand literally are so many 
closely co-operative systems of the non-dynamic type, set 
apart from everything else by a distinct class of internal 
co-operations. A tree is equally one thing ; defined as one 
object by very nearly the same class of internal co-opera- 
tions. To the lower grades of mind the tree must seem 
to be as simply one thing and nothing else as the pebble 
does. It is a different kind of thing, but all of the prop- 
erties of each are literally in the thing itself. Such minds 
take in that fact, which, in the one sense in which they 
perceive it, is a real objective fact. Their minds have 
only come into correspondence with the sensible proper- 
ties of the object, and the nature of things is such that 
while the world lasts the immature mind must first appre- 
hend all bodies in that way. 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 409 

It would be as absurd as impossible to make a five-year- 
old baby perceive and comprehend that the tree and the 
pebble in their different ways are each doing something 
to him whenever he looks at or touches them and that he 
at the same time is doing something to them. Probably 
the majority of grown up people in Christendom are ready 
to admit that the light sent from the object to the eye is 
something. But how many will concede that there must 
be a true reciprocity of doing between mind and object? 

Science has discovered the continuous exchange of 
temperature between hotter and colder bodies, and it 
teaches the exchange of free motion between bodies of the 
same temperature. It believes in certain non-sensible co- 
operations between all bodies and their environment. 
All of these several co-operative phases are between the 
sensible body and its immediate environment, while 
those which constitute it one body are internal. The 
added knowledge in the mind is knowledge of relations 
which extend into a wider area in space. 

The very young child sees his one pebble, one tree, one 
horse, each as a single object with no apparent thought 
about any relations which it may sustain to other things ; 
then he begins to relate it to himself, to desire or fear it ; 
and very gradually he establishes thought relations of the 
simplest kinds, not only between himself and his sur- 
roundings, but between the different objects of his ac- 
quaintance. All of his impressions are very general and 
far from well denned ; and they are all wholly concerned 
with the sensible properties of the tangible bodies. 
They are observations in the lump — the following out of 
Nature's classifications always in connection with his own 
immediate sensations. 

The classified knowledge of a naturalist may be in almost 
direct contrast to this more primary knowledge. It has 
not only gone widely afield with a universal classification 
which includes all sensible and many non-sensible things, 



4IO THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

but it has established multitudes of discriminations be- 
tween the likenesses and differences in the things classi- 
fied. It has selected the common properties, and rejected 
the dissimilarities. The knowledge has been acquired as 
a knowledge of details, as knowledge of internal as well as 
external characters, and throughout the process there has 
been a sifting of the like from the unlike. 

In general also the classifier of natural objects has be- 
come a logical thinker and has learned to deal with ideas 
as well as other things tangible. But there is no positive 
necessity that even a great classifier of Nature's measur- 
ably separate, sensibly defined bodies, should concern him- 
self with anything except the visible and tangible things 
and characters of the things which he is classifying. Dif- 
ferent naturalists are very different in this respect. The 
one holds himself closely to the things which he can dis- 
tinctly see and feel, and he takes little stock in anything 
outside of these sensible manifestations. He is a 
Positivist of the practical school. Like the child, he holds 
to the fastnesses of his own sensations, though he may 
perhaps accept the testimony of others as to their also 
positive sensations. 

To this class may belong the microscopists. It was 
not they who invented the microscope. Except so far as 
Nature herself has produced sundry magnifying glasses 
from which a mere sensationalist might receive practical 
suggestions, and so improve upon as to reveal to himself 
other undreamed-of visible wonders, the microscope mak- 
ers must have been thinkers and reasoners from non-sensi- 
ble phenomena. But the user of the microscope, though 
he finds a new world, need find only another sensible 
world ; and it may remain to him as exclusively a world 
of only sensible phenomena as the object world is when 
revealed to us by the help of the normal visual organs. 

It is entirely possible that a mind may fail to see that 
the special senses have all been evolved progressively ; 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 4II 

and that the microscope has been successively improved in 
much the same way. He may also fail to see that the 
eye and its nerves are as literally parts of the transmit- 
ting medium which conveys energy to and fro between 
the mind and the object as the microscope-acquired 
knowledge is a long way onward in the direction of 
the infinitely small, physically considered. And his 
knowledge is an exactly proportionate increase mentally 
estimated. 

But Mr. Darwin as a naturalist and Herbert Spencer as 
a philosopher would have remained two nearly unknown 
names if their fields of work had not been pre-eminently 
outside the sensible and its immediate inductions. They, 
and such as they, instead of being content to interpret 
sensible Nature only, follow up the clue which she offers 
into the domain of the insensible and of the far remote 
both in time and space. Their thought is no longer 
shaped in the mould of the visible and measurable forces 
alone ; they take the initiative, questioning and testing 
the correlativities which have been co-operatively in- 
terwoven in all past time and such as are still actively 
co-ordinated in all existing space. 

Just as the sensation of the form and color of the green 
tree is not a direct recognition of the vibratory lines of 
motion which constitute objective form and color, but is 
the living feeling which is inseparable from such vibra- 
tions when taken up and repeated in the soma as a part 
of its own modified vibratory phases ; so all physical 
changes and their correlativities, in order to become men- 
tally comprehended, must send on their complex modifi- 
cations to be virtually reproduced in the responsive 
vibratory phases of the persisting soma of consciousness. 
Then the attending thought is inevitable. 

But let us see if this is not the literal method by which 
all sentient experience is obtained. The special senses 
have no other supposable direct origin through natural 



412 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

causes progressively at work, than that of adapted re- 
sponse to physical stimulus, accompanied by physical 
response to desire or mental stimulus. There is, then, an 
actual co-operation between the Ego and the objects of 
sensation. 

We can hardly doubt that, in the sensation of sweet- 
ness awakened by sugar melting in the mouth, actual 
quivers of that mode of motion which constitutes the 
sugar-sweetness are carried onward by the nerves to the 
seat of responsive sensation. Nor can we well doubt that 
the actual forces of the vibrating senses which distinguish 
green colors from all other light are sent onward through 
the eye and its nerves to the same centre of responsive 
sensation. There is a longer line of continuous communi- 
cation between the tree and the mind than between the 
sugar and the mental appreciation of that. This is one 
of the many points which we are trying to bring into one 
comprehensible theory — the correlation between extensive 
and intensive changes. 

The infant begins its long novitiate with hunger ; with 
the presumable enjoyment afforded by the sense of taste, 
of grateful warmth, and of gentle touch. In general all 
of the more immediate sense impressions are a part of its 
early heritage. The prenatal growth of special organs 
indicates this much. After a little, it begins to notice 
objects close at hand, any object brought near its eyes; 
but apparently it sees nothing in the distance. Gradually 
the range of its vision and at the same time the voluntary 
control of the visual organs increase together ; and with 
these comes the evident pleasure from being able to make 
the acquaintance of new forms, colors ; and of the man- 
ifestations of love and good-will which it quickly recog- 
nizes in the smiles and kindly tones of those about it. 
Its attention manifestly extends outwards on all sides as 
literally as a sound, beginning at a given point, makes its 
way outwards in all directions ; or as the water waves, 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 413 

when a pebble is dropped upon the surface, grow larger 
and larger in increasing circles. 

The distant objects are all in place, sending their 
various light to the child as freely as to the mother hold- 
ing the infant in her arms. The mother sees them ; the 
child has not yet established efficient lines of communica- 
tion with them. A more defined and varied feeling must 
" grow to " the appreciation of an equivalently increased 
extension. The marvels revealed by the microscope ex- 
isted for centuries ; but no one saw them till they were 
ingeniously brought into the field of ordinary vision. The 
more advanced truths of science and philosophy waited 
their long ages for recognition ; but not until related 
truths led a few minds onwards step by step into active 
communication with them did they become recognized. 

Since everything finite both exists and acts in exact 
correlation, the perceiving mind and the something to be 
perceived — whether itself physical or psychical — must 
enter into active correspondence before the mind can 
know or the object can be known. And the mind must 
learn to direct its own investigations, to institute the 
search, and to carry it skilfully into adapted fields of 
inquiry where one class of data will shed a related illumi- 
nation upon related classes, before it can enter even a 
little way into the complexities of simultaneous near 
and remote copartnerships. 

Everything is power of some kind, in ceaseless action 
and in ceaseless modification from manifold coactivities. 
Free motion is the medium of interchange between all 
tensions, and equally between subject and object — the 
subject including both the mind and its soma. Attention 
must either be voluntarily directed to the object, or 
arrested by the object, before a resulting sensation and 
perception can be awakened. But in all perception and 
other cognition the attention excites and sends forward 
physical energy by the aid of its somatic changes as 



414 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

assuredly as it excites bodily motions by the same means. 
Subject and object are brought into working communica- 
tion by the intervention of transferred free motions, and 
it is only when all mental and physical modes are in 
co-operation that the resulting sensations can be evoked. 
But the interchange between subject and object is vari- 
ously modified by the medium through which they are 
brought into communication. On that point we have 
dwelt already. The transmitting nerves are in unlike 
states at different times in the same organism, and are 
very different in condition in different organisms of the 
same species, and far more in different species. The 
inorganic coworkers also greatly vary from time to time. 
Thus free energies are curiously modified by these many 
varying accidents. Sensibility, of whatever kind, thus 
seems to be more capricious, whether regarded as acting 
or as acted upon, than a true equivalence between feeling 
and motion, between cause and effect, can apparently 
justify. 

It is only by taking into account the entire line of 
co-ordinated process with its absorptions and transforma- 
tions en route, aided by a knowledge of parallel physical 
phenomena, that we can intelligently admit that cognition 
in the mind and the characters recognized in objects are 
always and everywhere true equivalents ; that the mind 
goes out to meet the object either literally in vibrations 
or by sending on its moulded physical modes as assuredly 
as the object in a parallel way comes or sends its modes 
to meet the mind. 

The free energies brought into the organism not only 
through every sense and through all surfaces, internal and 
external, through respiration and circulation, but which 
penetrate also into all tissues and are there accumulated 
for subsequent use, are so largely stored up in the brain 
that, when the outside world is no longer available, the 
mind by reflection can recall into renewed action the 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 415 

equivalent dynamic modes, can re-relate them physically, 
and by these means can not only revive its cognitions, but 
it can bring them into consciousness under new and before 
unperceived aspects and modifications. 

It can do all this consistently and logically, which is 
only another way of saying that it can learn to think with 
an actual mathematical equivalence — the physical changes 
and the psychical responses being actual equilibrating 
processes. Thinking is the exact correlate of the material 
processes which are brought into activity with the 
thought. 

Energies radiated from the sun are broken up in a 
thousand ways by the different bodies, which receive, re- 
ject, or partially appropriate with commutations, and 
then enter into a perpetual series of exchanges of the 
somewhat transposed modes — still energies nevertheless. 
The several modes can be exchanged only in correlation, 
hence until the mind can bring itself into working co-or- 
dinations with special energies, these may actively exist, 
yet to the mental cognizance every thing which they are 
able to reveal must still remain as an entire blank. One 
eye can see a smaller or a more remote object than 
another, and one man can see and can demonstrate the 
existence of facts, methods, principles, which the majority 
would have waited long to discover for themselves, 
though they may be able to follow and appreciate the 
truths when guided in the right direction. 

These transformed free motions, radiated from the sun 
or set at liberty in any way, no longer light, nor exclu- 
sively heat, are yet actively exchanged between the so7na 
of the mind and its co-operant upon the same physical 
basis as that of exchange between the general organism 
and its environment, or between any two bodies in remote 
co-operation. This interchange of dynamic modes may 
be regarded as the reverse of interchanged gravitation — 
the tense or static modes of co-operation. 



41 6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Hence the animal, more active, more dynamic in its 
processes than the vegetable, is in theory, and is in reality, 
if we can credit the testimony of numberless facts, far 
more benefited by light and other quickening radiated 
energies than the tree. The great difference is that while 
the tree can directly utilize the untransformed light in the 
manufacture of the green color of its leaves, the animal 
benefits by the thousand variously transmitted energies 
subsequently conveyed to it through many co-operative 
processes. 

The sun's energies are indeed stored up in wood and 
coal, but so they demonstrably are in living tissues. 
Everything which absorbs any free motion is proportion- 
ately quickened ; all of its co-operations become more 
energetic. Hence the organism, with processes which 
are all largely dynamic, which lives organically by absorb- 
ing and utilizing free or comparatively free energies, is 
ultimately the great utilizer of the sun's dynamic force. 
The development of consciousness in the one dominant 
mind, because of the co-ordination of all other organic 
processes to that end, is in like manner effected as an 
interchange of dynamic co-operations. 

This copartnership of activities does not create either 
personal life or the personal mind, but it does create ; 
that is, it calls into action, those physical modes which 
evoke the correlated mental experiences. The mind 
gains an enlarging outlook, which enables it more and 
more to recognize the nature of things. Its attributes 
are not merely sensations ; they are also recognition and 
comparison of the sensations, and of the causes produ- 
cing the sensations. In brief, mind is the recognition of 
the nature and methods of the active co-operations in 
which it becomes itself an efficient though not a physical 
co-operator. 

Every process having its own lines of co-operation, its 
pathways along which the coworking energies are exclu- 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 417 

sively active, though these may interpenetrate other 
lines and become somewhat modified by them, in general 
pursue their distinct course ; and must be traced, studied, 
and recognized as measurably complete in themselves. 

Consciousness, at the physical centre of many partially 
distinct, widely differenced, variously directed, and often 
partially intermitted dynamic processes, is able, in large 
measure, to control one and all of them at its own option. 
Thus it can turn its attention from sight to hearing, or to 
sensations of touch, or it can investigate these severally 
in their likenesses, differences, and working relationships. 
The mind has the advantage of being able to turn freely 
from any one object to another, and under usual condi- 
tions it is able to open or to close active communication 
between itself and most things which it desires to recog- 
nize or not to recognize. It can always close the eyes, 
and indirectly it can take itself away from obtrusive 
sounds and from all objects to be avoided. 

But whenever active relations are established between 
the soma, considered as physical subject, and any process as 
object, the evoked sensibility of the mind is the true cor- 
related equivalent of the modified somatic responses. 
But this reactionary feeling is in the nature of sensation, 
not of discrimination of the object or of objective cognition 
of any kind, unless it be of the sensation itself. But as a 
living, added Reeling, adapted in kind to the kind and 
amount of vibratory modifications somatically in active 
exercise, it is an accurate and correlated inseparable 
term, as constitutionally as the direction of every motion 
is inseparable from the motion itself. 

The perception and cognition of the object as some- 
thing to be known ; and to be known in interrelation with 
other objects and their copartnerships, though perhaps 
objective stimulated, must be subjectively achieved — 
of course with continuous physical aid. Just here we 
reach the generic distinction between a nascent sensibility 



418 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

and self-conscious mind. The one is blind, the other sees. 
Sensation is the sentient reaction. Nascent desire and the 
forward impulse which it gives may be wholly blind, and 
we know of no conditions in which it acts, before one mind 
becomes the great meeting-place of the organic free ener- 
gies, which could enable it either to become clearly con- 
scious or to become clearly cognizant of objective causes. 

Not until the organism has accumulated tensions which 
can be readily converted into dynamic modes, so co-or- 
dinated that they are at the instant service of the Ego in 
its quest for causes, can the recognition of the causes — that 
is, of objects, of objective processes — even begin to come 
into active exercise. 

The mind must be able to press these available free 
motions into its service, thus quickening it own soma and 
the entire line of communication between itself and the 
something to be known before the cognitive experiences 
can be evoked. Knowledge can arise only as the result 
of subjective and objective question and response. Mind 
is inherent power, and many of its possible experiences are 
cognitive ; but they must become actual experiences 
through adapted co-operations. The desire to know what 
causes a sensation, is as spontaneous a sentient mode as 
the desire for more sensation. But not until the means 
for gratifying such desires have been practically provided 
can the cognitive experiences begin to accumulate. 

Organization slowly established through co-ordinated 
material and mental working copartnerships gradually 
evolve the conditions under which mind can begin to 
acquire those experience* which constitute it mind — in dis- 
tinction from latent mind and from simple sensation and 
instinct. 

The human mind can soon begin to reason, to make 
legitimate conclusions from premises, to modify and 
variously test the co-operative factors through which its 
experiences are acquired ; and it can progressively learn 



THE EVOLUTION OF MIND. 419 

to know them and their methods as assuredly as it can 
learn to know its own mental states and acquirements. 

Most animal minds also have real cognitions ; and some 
of these manifest logical if very limited reasoning powers ; 
yet they are all subject to organic limitations which plainly 
announce — so far as the present and near future are con- 
cerned — thus far mentally but no farther ! In the long 
vista of possible organic advance, the future dominant 
minds of these now structurally incompetent organisms 
may perhaps emerge into a rational and consciously self- 
guiding and accumulating evolved consciousness. But 
the outlook is not greatly encouraging in that direction, 
since instinct, which is but unreasoning desire, is already 
so far structurally provided for that the infants — especially 
among the lowest species structurally and the least intelli- 
gent mentally — are already born to a maturity of co-ordin- 
ated mental and physical processes beyond which they gain 
but very little during the entire organic life. They seem 
to be at once aided and limited by the organic structural 
characters ; and to be virtually prisoners within a deter- 
minate enclosure from which they have no opportunity 
for escape. Co-ordinations, ready made in almost perfect 
working order at birth, can only mean a dominance of 
material suggestions and adaptations, ready to excite ac- 
quiescent desire which must content itself mentally with 
whatever is offered, instead of becoming itself intelligently 
the leader and the seeker after wider knowledge. 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 

SINCE all changes arise in correlation, the mind may- 
make an object of its own soma, or one aspect of the con- 
sciousness may study another, as its objective or opposed 
coworker in the common process. Subject and object 
may be any two contrasted correlated phases of one co- 
ordination ; but as it is only mind which can note such 
contrasted modes, the mind alone is properly subjective. 
It may put itself as subject either in opposition to the 
total remainder of the related universe or to any one of 
several special processes, which it is able to relate to each 
other, and all to itself. It is these special processes, 
actively related to the mind at its option, which we des- 
ignate the co-operant. 

By intently occupying one's mind in some other direc- 
tion, though the eyes are open and a tree sends its light 
into them with full activity, no sensation or perception of 
the tree will arise. Sugar may melt in the mouth, yet not 
be tasted. Words may be spoken in one's ears, yet make 
no impression. Under such conditions, these energies are 
all active, but they are not the mind's co-operant, because 
the mind does not actively associate itself with them in a 
joint process. The organism disposes of them in some 
way, and later the appropriate sensations may come steal- 
ing into the consciousness like belated children into a 
school-room. At another time they may never become 
sensations. 

Has there ever been an adequate explanation of facts 
like these? Attention is mental, yet without a co- 

420 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 42 1 

operative attention, physical energies adapted to excite 
feeling are turned aside and wasted, so far as feeling is 
concerned. We are bound not only to explain in what 
sense motion can be a legitimate cause of feeling ; but we 
must reach some thinkable explanation of what attention 
is, and of the part which it plays, both in the felt experi- 
ence and in the inhibiting of the experience. A great 
deal has been written upon the subject, but attention and 
physical processes have never been thinkably related as 
causes and effects. 

Attention cannot be a faculty or property of the 
mind, special in kind. Like memory, it must be asso- 
ciated with every variety of experience. Without some 
memory, no one could relate the several parts of an 
object into one whole, nor could he think a relation 
between any two things, as parent and child, or perform 
any other mental act, however simple. So without some 
attention to every recognition, to every thought and voli- 
tion, none of these experiences can get into the conscious- 
ness. Every phase of the sensibility, then, must get into 
the mind through the doorway of attention, accompanied 
by memory. 

With the attention directed to the object, a process is 
completed which eventuates in feeling. Without the 
attention, free motion is evidently carried into the organ- 
ism, because sometimes, though the object has been with- 
drawn and several moments have elapsed, especially if the 
attention is called to the rescue, the proper feeling will 
come surging into the mind — perhaps as a dim and faded 
sensation. The objective cause of the sensibility has 
evidently made some roundabout progress, or has returned 
upon its path. Do not facts like these indicate that the 
mind, by occupying itself with the object, sends out 
towards it pulses of directed motion, which meet and 
coalesce with like pulses coming from the object. We 
might compare the meeting to the closing of an electric 



422 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

circuit ; or perhaps the mind only throws out the phy- 
sical bridge along which the oncoming energy is conducted 
directly to the soma y while without this aid it would be 
carried along diverging paths. 

Visual images are sometimes recalled as actual pictures 
repeated again and again within the organism. Probably 
no one doubts that in a case like that, vibrations like those 
reflected from the object are still pulsing to and fro in 
the nerve mechanism. The something sent into the 
eye from the object is motion, we all admit ; then the 
something which meets it, hastening the sensation 
because the attention has gone out to meet it, is also 
motion. 

There seems to be but one conclusion possible — that is, 
that the mind literally moves with the vibrators of its 
soma to meet the incoming tide ; that the mind co-oper- 
ates in every physical process connected with its own 
sensibility, directing the physical changes by directing its 
own processes, since the two aspects of the same unity 
must work in correlation. The attention is the mind 
turned towards the object ; it is the mind seeking to take 
part in the co-operation of whatever kind. And the motion 
causes the feeling by producing the somatic modifications 
with which an adapted feeling is always correlated. But 
when the mind is otherwise intently occupied, com- 
munication with it is cut off. Some portion of the 
complex nervous structure protects it by otherwise 
disposing of the oncoming motion and utilizing it 
elsewhere. 

So long as a consciousness is mainly instinctive desire, 
is a sensibility largely awakened by the presented solici- 
tations, attention can be but an uncertain element as 
director. It has as yet acquired no large stock of ex- 
perience, and discriminations even between the desirable 
and the undesirable, can be only roughly made in the 
presence of the objects of choice. Even after a very con- 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 423 

siderable gain in intelligence, the active transmission to 
it of the appropriate objective stimulus is essential to the 
fixing of the attention. 

An active child wants everything that it sees until it 
has learned by experience that some things are harmful. 
It is alert also to accept of every suggestion. Unable to 
direct itself, it is in the attitude of waiting for suggestions. 
But when it has learned something of its own powers, 
having its own way becomes an immense fascination. If it 
can find things enough to rivet its attention, it desires to 
experiment and test everything for itself ; it is delighted 
to be able to turn freely from one thing to another under 
no other control. But it soon tires and comes back with 
its endless question, " What can I do, mamma ? " 

The child, every animal, and the majority of men, not 
hungry or needing food, will eat it with relish if it is 
placed before them. Either is ready promptly to respond 
to any object to which the sensations have become pleas- 
antly related, and to avoid any other which it has been 
taught by experience would only give pain ; but neither 
animal, child, nor a badly developed man is able to fix the 
attention long upon any object which is not now making 
its direct appeal through some one or more of the special 
senses. 

Later on, as experience accumulates and as the organ- 
ism has matured, every part being impelled by use to add 
to and strengthen itself, the squirrel, the bee, the ant, and 
many other creatures not only begin a deliberate search 
for one kind of food rather than another, but they have 
grown wise enough to store up the desired food for future 
use. The mind seems to have learned to fix its attention 
upon objects which are not immediately present to it as 
sensation ; though it may be that, with the food and 
the storage place both before it, it is but more complexly 
stimulated by mingled sensations, and is still but little 
impelled by conscious deliberate choice. 



424 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

But the mature man has accustomed himself to fix his 
attention upon this object or that at will, whether it be 
present or absent. He has learned to represent it to him- 
self in thought almost as distinctly as he can see it when 
before his eyes or feel it when it is under his hand. In 
time he learns to relate object to object mentally and to 
recognize their relations to each other even more clearly 
by the help of reflection than by the direct help of his 
senses. 

Skill of this kind has been but gradually acquired. If 
the primary sensations are real experiences of one per- 
sonal mind, but only to be evolved as sensibility through 
active association from the immediate co-operant, it be- 
comes evident that when any object at a distance makes 
its impression upon the mind there must be either an 
actual or a virtual meeting of the two. That there is 
present communication between subject and object in all 
sensations is as certain as that any two attracting bodies 
are somehow in correlated action. If then the object 
radiates its own special modes, the intervening medium, 
organic or inorganic, may transfer them essentially un- 
changed to the soma ; and as the feeling is but the living 
realization of its allied mode of motion, the sensation 
truly interprets the motion in the terms of experience. 

When feeling initiates attention to the object this must 
mean that physical modes corresponding to the feeling 
travel onward from the soma to the object. When the 
recipient is another mind, we know from experience that 
a like feeling is often communicated. Thus, a cry of 
distress may excite a like distress in another, but the 
medium of communication between the two minds is 
purely physical ; waves of literal motion are sent on from 
the one to the other. These sound waves were excited 
by feeling,and they originate kindred feeling in the recipi- 
ent ; yet the feeling is not transformed into motion nor 
is the motion reconverted to feeling. They are but the 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 425 

two aspects of one group of changes in each individual. 
The motion moves on as a continuous progress through 
the medium, which helps the energy on its way without 
much absorption and apparently with but little active 
participation ; thus it receives but a proportionately small 
share of added feeling. The physical connection must be 
made in some way between subject and object, and, like 
all other transference of energy, it is made through the 
agency of intermediate vibrations. A burn on the foot is 
felt in the foot ; the prick of the finger, in the finger. The 
soma literally or co-operately permeates not only the 
organism, but the extra-organic. Is it in every part of 
the organism, or is it enough that its varying modes in- 
cessantly travel in and out in all directions — at once 
giving and receiving on all sides in joint process with its 
co-operant ? Who can yet decide ? 

Active exchange of physical modes there must be con- 
tinuously between the Ego and its special object of sense 
else the proper subjective sensation at once ceases. The 
mind may attempt to direct the attention to a lesion in 
the foot, but if the related spinal nerves have been par- 
alyzed there can be no communication along that line. 
There can be no feeling of the lacerated state of the foot, 
no pain experienced in the responsive consciousness. 

The hampered Psyche has still other open channels of 
communication with the lacerated members. It can see 
the wounded foot, making use of the healthy visual 
nerves, the light, and the atmosphere as its medium ; it 
can feel the wound with the hand and can estimate the 
extent of the hurt by the sense of touch and the knowl- 
edge which it has gained from past experience acquired 
through the hand. The accompanying feeling in each 
case will be very unlike ; and yet the feeling must accu- 
rately express the differentiated modifications which are 
evolved between the soma and the extremely unlike as- 
pects of the disabled foot. In each case a real knowledge 



426 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

has been evoked in the conscious mind. By putting the 
various possible experiences together, it may give a more 
adequate knowledge than would otherwise be possible. 
Our senses are disparate. The feelings which they 
respectively evoke seem to be each complete of its kind ; 
yet they all become portions of one knowledge. They 
blend into the one broader, mutually verified truth, which 
can become so amply tested in the light of many confirm- 
atory facts that, however, philosophy with a bias may argue 
against it, no one can really disbelieve in it as actual 
knowledge of actual things. 

Among this class of truths is the belief in objective 
reality and in subjective individuality. Our knowledge of 
these great truths may be very inadequate ; yet the young 
child recognizes both. And no philosopher quite suc- 
ceeds in banishing either the one or the other from con- 
sciousness. The great need is to find some consonant 
interpretation which will bring them both back in con- 
sistent relations with other discovered realities. 

Perception is the mind comparing its sensations and 
their causes ; is mind attending to some of its past and 
present experiences, and perhaps repeating others more 
varied in their conditions in order to judge of their real 
characteristics. Such perceptions may be little more than 
instinctive, as they evidently are with children and with 
animals ; or they may include the most careful and in- 
geniously varied observations of science. The mind is 
able to question indirectly its own physical nature, bring- 
ing it into recognition with the inclusive co-operant in 
order to study its relations to its own sensibility. In this 
case the soma is made a part of the object. But the mind 
may regard the soma as subjective jointly with its corre- 
lated consciousness — putting both in opposition to the 
objective co-operant. This last is the sense in which we 
use the terms subject and object, the Ego and its co-oper- 
ant, unless otherwise distinctly indicated. 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 427 

Perception is active, is usually mind voluntary, mind 
self-impelled to study process of any kind. When the 
mind becomes an active part of such a co-operation, the 
objective becomes as distinctly recognizable as the sub- 
jective. The one is an outlook to the something which 
it is working with, the other is the inlook towards the 
modifications in its personal sensibility ; but the two are 
in working correlation and the consciousness, itself correl- 
ative, may include the whole active correlation, not as a 
part of itself, but as the something with which the self 
has a lively and conscious concern. The object is the 
something demanding a recognition by virtue of the com- 
munication which it is helping to open between itself and 
the living actor. There may be physical co-operation, 
but there is no knowledge except when mind intelli- 
gently enters into the process. Our universe is purely a 
universe whose energies all work in correlation. 

Every atom is the centre and the possible subject in its 
own outlying universe. But every atom is not the centre 
of an organism. If organized at all, it is but wrought into 
the rim or the spoke of one wheel and destined to be 
thrown off by the rapid movement at no distant date. Yet, 
organized or unorganized, it succeeds under all conditions 
in remaining the adjusting material centre of its environ- 
ment, reacting on all sides with its co-operant, quantity for 
quantity. This is but a corollary of the law of continuous 
equilibration. 

The conscious Ego becomes increasingly cognizant of 
the external world in the proportion in which it is enabled 
efficiently, that is dynamically, to relate itself to the object 
which it desires to know. It is not merely co-operation 
between material subject and object which can give knowl- 
edge, else every atom would probably know the total of 
correlated being. This total is doubtless in some remote 
degree its co-operant. Chemical compounding with its 
approximate rest is real co-operation ; but there is every 



428 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

reason to believe that it is co-operation often almost 
entirely without active consciousness of any kind. 

Nor can simply dynamic copartnerships be of necessity 
favorable to the evolution of sensibility. A particle of 
ether or of common air or a particle in an electric current 
— each actively transmitting successive flashes of energy 
but retaining none of it — must be in a condition to acquire 
but little more sensibility at the end of a century of such 
co-operation than it acquired at the beginning. Again 
it is not simply large copartnerships, organic or inorganic, 
which can aid the mind in its evolution. The mind must be 
enabled to retain much of the free energy and to store up 
energy of many available kinds in places convenient both 
for present and future use, in order that it may actively 
relate itself to the objects to become known. 

The substance which either promptly transmits or 
reflects heat is no hotter than before ; but if it absorbs the 
heat it becomes itself heated. A living organism — the 
perpetual recipient of active energies — absorbs these 
energies through every special sense, through every breath 
inhaled, through every inch of sensible surface, and doubt- 
less through the insensible interstices. Taking its daily 
food, it dines upon energy, variously dynamic. It is 
believed that there is a measurable relation between the 
food taken and the muscular strength into which it is con- 
verted. Heat, and light, and sound, and electricity, and 
odor, and savor, are all energies. Some of these are 
organically absorbed at every instant, sleeping and waking. 
Many of them are too subtle in modes readily to become 
flesh. Besides we know that all mental exercise is physi- 
cally exhausting, and that active material force is in some 
way expended in connection with all mental activity. 

What more probable than that it is exactly these freer, 
subtler modes of energizing which most readily associate 
themselves actively in the furtherance of the increasing 
sensibility ? Then there are the instructive attesting facts. 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 429 

The ability to mentally reproduce an impressive sound 
may continue for days or even months and years. The 
voice and the face of a loved one can be revived in 
thought, and the process is not all mental. Objects which 
we have intently studied continue to appear after the eyes 
are closed. In this way we can distinguish letters and 
figures in a shifting picture, and for the moment at least 
we have no power to immediately shut out these images 
as representations of the things at which we have been too 
steadily looking. The nerves are still reverberating, 
vibrating in ways which are certainly closely analogous to 
the vibrations of a heated body. Not until these images 
gradually fade away — as motion of any kind is gradually 
dissipated and transformed, — or till the attention is sharply 
directed elsewhere, do the images disappear. 

The gradual fading out while we are still curiously but 
passively studying them, is like other phenomena of indi- 
rect motion, which must be speedily transformed by 
surrounding interferences, except that the images are 
intra-organic and induced motion, such as the vibrating 
of a tense string, is extra-organic. But note that if the 
attention is turned elsewhere with sharp determination 
the images are immediately blotted out so far as the percep- 
tion of them is concerned. But though one no longer sees 
them subjectively the objective vibrations must be still in 
action unless they have been suddenly transformed by the 
directed attention. A motion never ceases in one mode 
until it is transformed into some other mode. What then 
suddenly becomes of the vibrations when perception is 
no longer a recipient of the sentient effects ? But if the 
nervous system is very much demoralized, as after an ill- 
ness, it may be impossible to so divert the attention as to 
quickly destroy the sense of vision. One tries not to see 
them, tries to attend to something else, but the images 
continue to dance in the nerves like small demons who 
will not be exorcised. The nerves have assumed the mas- 



430 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

tery and for the time the resourceless Ego must submit to 
their freakish domination as certainly as a small child must 
be overthrown by the vigorous pushes of a larger child, 
let him push back as stoutly as he can. 

The inference is that the nervous system is the ready 
implement, the immediate co-operant of the Ego in its 
commerce with the extra-organic world. Every implement 
reacts after its own methods ; the nervous system trans- 
mits pulses of energy to and fro between object and sub- 
ject, by means of its own vibratory function which enables 
it to act as carrier between the two. The plan of trans- 
mission probably has its own proper modifications, but 
the general scheme is obviously like that of all other 
energy transmission which is not too much complicated 
by absorption and transformation. 

But when the nervous continuity is disordered from 
any cause and the nerves become unduly absorbent of 
the energy which they should send on to its normal des- 
tination, they begin to set up a mimic vibratory disturb- 
ance of their own. Hence the dancing letters and 
figures which reverberate like an echo after an over-tired 
man ceases to read the printed page. The Ego has lost 
the full control of its servant, and is being pushed and 
pulled with more or less irregular jerking after he has 
called a halt. Very much as any rickety machine will go 
on in parts, when power is applied for stopping it, because 
the parts are no longer fully co-ordinated ; so the nerves 
do this rebellious reverberating in a disorderly and irra- 
tional manner. The mind clearly is using a tool which is 
very far from being in the best condition. 

Sensation is more prolonged than the objective stimu- 
lation, as shown by the effect of an electric single shock in 
a muscle, and the duration of light from the rapid twirl- 
ing of a lighted brand. The positive "after-image," 
which is but prolonged motion with sensation, belongs to 
the same order of effects. When the stimulus is large 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 43 1 

the after-image may appear though the system is in good 
condition ; as when on first waking we look for a minute 
at the window with its strong light and dark setting and 
then shut the eyes, we continue to see the window very 
much as before for a perceptible time. These are simple 
examples of continued reverberation, but they indicate 
reflex action somehow in the nerve centres. In active 
sensation the soma may be regarded as the ultimate reflex 
centre of the entire process. 

Negative after-images, which appear in colors the com- 
plementaries of the originals, are rarely, if ever, seen 
except when the eye is acting somewhat abnormally. 
Our vibratory theory leads directly to the inference that 
the alternate vibrators are doing substitution work. The 
inflowing energy not finding ready utilization is trans- 
ferred to the alternate vibrators and re-radiated by 
them. 

Something of a similar kind often occurs between posi- 
tive and negative electricity, when it is suddenly found 
that the normal action is exactly reversed in direction. 
The two electricities being but the complementaries of 
each other, the phenomena are very similar to those of 
the negative after-images, though the latter are more 
directly connected with the phenomena of vision. The 
right and left crystals and the organic masses which turn 
the ray of polarized light either to the right or the left — 
often so related that the one offsets the other and marks 
the point of cleavage at the dividing of the mass in 
aid of new growths — may be explained at least in part 
by the various action of alternate vibrations with their 
differently timed directions subject to diverse influences. 
An apparently asymmetrical form with a really underlying 
symmetry may exist in some primary atoms, or both 
causes combined may help to produce the curious effects 
of manifest right and left both in tensions and in free 
motions. Unlike causes result in like effects sometimes. 



432 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Our purpose here is to indicate the close analogies 
between the co-operations where free motions predomi- 
nate — with or without a controlling mental action — and 
the co-operations where tensions predominate. These 
last are seldom if ever under a conscious direct control. 
The organism is the intervening mediator between the 
mind and all dense bodies. 

Visual sensations, whether the field of their seeming 
manifestation is internal or external, appear only in con- 
nection with the organs of vision. The after-images seem 
to dance within the eyes or in a field just behind them ; 
and of two trees one appears near by and the other 
remote. Our claim is that, other things equal, the seem- 
ing represents the actual facts. One tree is farther away 
than the other. The co-operative process is a longer one 
when the tree is remote and the mind has learned to esti- 
mate distance by the corresponding sensations. The 
vibratory phenomena of the after-images are within the 
organism — the lingering motion, echoes of the original 
process. 

In representation, in imagination, in reasoning, even in 
volition, the mind makes use of energy organically stored 
in its behalf. A mentally originated image of a thing is but 
a degree farther removed from the object than the after- 
image ; and it is sometimes called up in a similar field 
by the internal re-stimulation of the visual apparatus. 
Memory works with varying success in reproducing con- 
ditions akin to those which accompanied the first ex- 
perience. The remembrance of a flavor or an odor is 
revived by the help of the organs which originated the 
experience. A remembered hand-clasp is felt in the hand, 
a kiss upon lips or cheek. As nearly as may be, the 
special senses and organs are instinctively made to per- 
form a similar part in the representation to that of their 
earlier share in the presentation. 

The feeling now causes the responsive motion in each 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERA NT. 433 

case, as the motion originally caused the feeling adapted 
to its own special modes. Neither is converted into the 
other ; but they become modified together — as all corre- 
lates must be. The theory is consistently verified by the 
facts. The active energy which enters into the revival 
process is reclaimed from somewhere within the organic 
economy. Innervation, however produced, is achieved at 
the expense of dynamic activity. Free motion is as 
unquestionably consumed in all representation as it is in 
all presentation. 

Imagination, enjoyed more especially by the young, the 
emotional, and the ideally inclined, is mind in the free 
exercise of its activities by co-operation with more internal 
portions of the nervous structure, whose modes it directs 
largely at its own pleasure with varying degrees of 
delightful capriciousness. When the mind is well informed 
and has become logical in its methods, its imaginings are 
generally logical and congruous. There is a felt necessity 
for an internal harmony among all the parts of the pres- 
entations. The idealizing may be as lofty of its kind as 
any more slowly acquired real knowledge. It may be 
especially fascinating, because there is the lively sense of 
originating, with a kind of freedom which cannot be exer- 
cised in the almost equally facile but more carefully 
laborious and more deeply enjoyable efforts to discover 
nature's actual many-relationed truths. The poet feels 
and dreams along the free lines which he himself desires. 

An undisciplined imagination runs riot in almost any 
direction, especially if the desire for extravagance of 
thought and feeling is in the ascendant. A practical and 
usually plodding man may especially relish slipping out 
occasionally into the realm of admitted fiction, where 
thoughts and emotions have an inconsequential, easy 
swing, in marked contrast to every-day life. If he cannot 
dream rhapsodies for himself, he may like to read, to repro- 
duce, as nearly as he can in his own experience, the most 
28 



434 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

improbable dreams of others. The Rider Haggards have 
their uses — valuable, in their kind, to even a large variety 
of minds. 

If feeling, from its simplest beginnings up to its most 
complex thought-relations, is the legitimate outcome of 
process actively set up between the Ego and some portion 
of its co-operant, then imagination, including fancy, must 
begin to act as instinctively as any other kind of sensi- 
bility. Heredity has conferred the rudimentary nervous 
structure, ready to co-act with the immature mind. As 
surely as on opening its eyes the child must begin to see 
objects — doubtless at first confusedly, — so must it have 
fancies and vague imaginings long before it has arrived at 
definite thoughts. Everything which it sees, or feels by 
contact, or hears, or tastes, must give rise to wondering 
and speculation before even the sensations are clearly 
recognized. 

Stimulus from the outer world finds the organism in 
readiness for its work. The Ego responds by its double- 
sided motions and feelings, but is too inexperienced to 
utilize its resources by accurate perceptions. Its nascent 
imaginings stimulate portions of the brain earlier than 
other portions. Theory suggests this result, but obser- 
vation confirms its validity. 

The plays of all young animals are almost purely " make 
believes." The young puppy pretends to bite, to hurt 
and be hurt, to be afraid of a blow or of a companion ; it 
makes feints of all kinds appropriate to a dog whose 
imagination ever becomes vivid or complex, and who 
is destined to live mainly in a world of very present 
suggestions. 

The child, whose mental world is to include past and 
future almost as vividly and more imaginately than even 
its present, very early becomes a little acting bundle of 
the most incongruous fancies. Its " pretend " people seem 
to be as real to its feelings as father or mother. Its doll 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 435 

may be more its comforting confidant and loved com- 
panion than sister or brother. The ideal may have more 
delightful episodes than the real. Mr. and Mrs. Noah, 
their children, their animals and trees, would not have the 
slightest value otherwise. 

With this play of fancy — the germ of the loftiest imagi- 
nations — begins the new world of feeling, which has no 
direct objective counterpart. The co-operations by which 
they are evolved are no longer directly traceable to the 
extra-organic. Yet can there be a shadow of doubt 
that the energy by means of which they are wrought out 
is entirely derived from the environment ? It is like elec- 
tricity, first communicated to a dynamo, and by its help 
utilized in cutting and shaping and doing other practical 
work performed by especially adapted implements. 

Bundles of nerves, spreading tree-like, become differ- 
enced in functions like other organs. That they are all 
co-operative with the soma when rightly stimulated, there 
is no question. They may have special motor relations 
of their own, as shown when remote movements arise in 
some sensible organ if the related part of the brain is 
stimulated. But the brain is the pre-eminent organ, the 
direct co-operant of the mind. Over-exertion mentally is 
first felt as weariness or pain somewhere within the 
cranium. Every one is conscious that the thinking is done 
by the help of the brain ; but the energy by which the 
brain works is previously accumulated. 

Food, internally appropriated, like all freer modes, is 
brought into the organism from the environment. It is 
as much external to the special tissues which absorb and 
utilize it, as sound is to the ear which absorbs the sound 
vibrations. The inbreathing of the lungs, drawing the 
vital fluid into the very depths of the system, is only 
another method by which external energy is brought to 
internal structure which needs it, and can become co- 
operative with it. Every particle, whether static or 



436 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

dynamic in form, is external to every other particle, how- 
ever intimate their co-operation. Every motion is external 
to every other motion. Though the two become blended 
in an indistinguishable oneness yet each remains external 
to the other, because each occupies an extension to which 
the other cannot penetrate. Hence the co-operant of the 
mind in its most reflective moods, and the stimulation — 
the pure dynamic energy which circulates and invigorates 
every process, — are as external to the Ego as any other 
objective influences. 

" Thinking is relationing." But what does thought 
relation? Not one external object to other external 
objects, for something external can no more get into the 
actual consciousness than it can get into and occupy the 
actual extension. The mind's thought is the mind ; it is 
one change of the living sensibility. To relation thought 
to thought is to relation one mode, one change intelli- 
gently apprehended by a self-conscious mind as a concep- 
tion or cognition, to other modes, other cognitions. The 
thinking is purely subjective though it arises in depen- 
dence upon the objective — as all modifications of motion 
pertain to the individual, though produced by outside co- 
operations. 

The parallel between motion and feeling is perfect so 
far as the present activity is concerned. With extended 
dynamic processes, the perceptions become increasingly 
varied and discriminative ; and with the organic accumu- 
lation of available energy which the mind can use at its 
own discretion, the several processes of reflection, reason- 
ing, classifying, and testing the cognitions, by referring 
them back to the co-operant, is carried on by each 
individual mind according to the conditions of its devel- 
opment as subjected to the kind and degree of choice 
accorded to its own volitions. 

As every motion must arise in correlation, so must 
every mental change ; the difference is that a motion can 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 437 

have no choice as to how it will move, while even an in- 
stinctive desire can turn its coworking motor allies in 
the direction which immediately gratifies its desire ; and 
intelligence can indirectly but more effectively guide and 
control its co-operant in the furtherance of its desires. 
The inventor can plan, can construct, and by the aid of 
steam or electricity can use his machine to manufacture 
other machines indefinitely ; but he can only do these 
things by more directly using his brain. The entire pro- 
cess becomes his co-operant ; but the brain is more within 
his own immediate control, both because he is in the 
midst of it — if not a veritable part of it so far as his soma 
is included — and because the store of accumulated nerve 
force is as much prepared and ready for the mind's dis- 
posal of it as gunpowder and shot in the weapon held in 
a man's hand is ready and waiting for the signal to do its 
executive work. 

Static relations, however slight, between the soma 
and the co-operant help to maintain the steadiness and 
equipoise of the more dynamic modes. When the mind 
utilizes external dense bodies, their density may become 
an additional mode of power in its behalf. The wood- 
man's heavy axe, swung at the same rate with a light one, 
deals the heavier blow. But more dynamic force is re- 
quired to wield it successfully. This added force is carried 
by nerves and muscles into the axe and by the axe into 
the wood which it cleaves asunder. Thus force is literally, 
in mode, transferred from the organism into the block of 
wood. 

Previously the dynamic modes were either given to the 
organism as food, as atmosphere in breathing, or as stimu- 
lation to one of the special senses. Now we know that 
intelligence, helped by nerves and muscles, swings the axe 
in order, let us say, to get kindling-wood to build a fire. 
But it is not intelligence which is really carried over into 
the kindling-wood. It is not intelligence which literally 



438 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

splits the wood into pieces. And to assert that one's in- 
tellect is a little less after splitting up kindling-wood than 
it was just before the act, because some small part of it 
has gone over in a series of transformations into that 
literal splitting process, is highly preposterous. 

But if intellect does not become motion, neither does 
motion become intellect — become sensibility or feeling of 
any kind. Changing an unconscious motion into a con- 
scious thought is utterly unthinkable. So is the changing 
of a living thought, of a purely rational idea, back into a 
non-living and purely mechanical motion. We are bound 
to find a thinkable relationship. We must be able to 
suggest modes by which each can act with the other, and 
through such co-operations can produce changes in the co- 
worker, or else frankly accept the fact that we don't know 
whether mind and matter are or are not mutually con- 
vertible. 

If we admit that matter has either a potential or an 
actual sensibility — which is not matter, since the actual 
sensibility may or may not be present when the material 
is present, but which, under definitely established con- 
ditions, becomes active in correlation with the adapted 
material modes, — then there is no more trouble in thinking 
how and why mind can effect transformations of modes 
in matter, and conversely matter can effect transformations 
in modes of mind, than there is in thinking how one piece 
of matter can produce changes in the form of another 
piece by being forcibly thrust against it. The mind, in- 
herent in its own piece of matter, either accepts the 
change because its piece of matter accepts the push ; or 
else the mind causes its piece of matter to give the push. 
The mind is an active part of each group of inter- 
actions ; yet the mind can no more be thought to 
have actual extensive properties, than the direction of a 
motion can be thought to be actual power or energy of 
any kind. 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 439 

Form is not substance ; yet every extensive substance 
must have form. Feeling is not the whole of sensitive 
substance ; yet every sensitive substance must have the 
possibility of feeling. Many things are inseparably bound 
together which are yet so generically unlike in character 
that the transmutation of the one into the other is not 
simply unthinkable ; the thought negatives the possibility 
without the slightest hesitation. 

Think of trying to change the hollow inside of a break- 
fast cup into the cup itself. Yet the two are inseparable 
so long as the cup remains a cup. Break it in pieces ; 
there is no longer the inside limited form. Think now of 
trying to change the objective vibrations which produce 
sound waves into the feeling which one has in listening to 
these pulsating throbs of energy. The waves may have 
come into one's own brain ; they may be echoing in one's 
own material soma ; we hold that they not only may but 
that they must be doing so ; yet these pulses of wave- 
motion are more distinctly unlike the feeling which 
responds to them than the hollow place inside of the 
breakfast cup, defined by the breakfast cup, is unlike the 
porcelain of the cup itself. 

A relative feeling may be forever attended by a related 
motion, so that when the active motion ceases the active 
feeling must cease, and vice versa; but to attempt to 
identify the two kinds of modes is worse than attempting 
to identify the hollow inside of the cup with the sub- 
stance of the cup, for at least they are both concerned 
with space and with the extensions and forms which 
occupy space. But the feeling when considered by itself 
has no direct concern with anything except with other 
modes of feeling; with their likenesses, differences, and 
transmutations, and with the times during which they 
linger in the consciousness. All of these things are sui 
generis, and belong to the exclusive inside world of one 
personal consciousness in its purely subjective experiences. 



440 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Quite another inquiry pertains to the outside causes 
of these feelings. It is as though the inside hollow in 
the cup should wake up to its own existence and begin 
to ask : What is it that has put me into this cosy niche 
and given me this rounded smooth form ? When the sen- 
sibility begins to compare the causes of its sensations 
with its sensations and with each other, it begins to be 
mind proper. 

But who shall attempt to prove that the intellectual 
outlook towards causes, towards their methods, combina- 
tions, and variations of all kinds, is not as purely and 
legitimately a mental act, though it now becomes con- 
sciously co-operative with the objective ? Introspection 
is also in working correlation with the objective, though 
perhaps not consciously so. It is the shape of the cup 
which produces the shape of the hollow in the cup, 
whether the " hollow nothingness " is aware of that fact 
or otherwise. 

The theory that the incoming motion is really con- 
verted into the feeling has arisen naturally enough from 
not fully considering all of the relations which exist 
between causes and effects. The two are not always con- 
vertible in modes, and they are never actually convertible. 
A world of misapprehension has arisen from the un- 
guarded statement of the law of the Conservation of 
Energy. It has long been an accepted truth that 
every entity must continue to be itself, and that it can 
never be transformed into anything else. But if the 
theory that matter is motion, whether it be vortex motion 
or rhythmic motion, is consistently accepted, there can 
logically be but one undivided entity — the absolute being 
or force of the universe. This persistent force is con- 
ditioned into individual units ; but only in a sense very 
like that in which we may separate a square inch of the 
atmosphere from all the rest by limiting it with some 
kind of assumed boundary. The ultimate individual of 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 441 

matter (and of mind-matter if the two aspects are con- 
ditioned together) has been marked off from the whole 
outlying total by a special vortex motion (or by a group 
of motions with resulting feelings). 

The law of conservation was so stated or so interpreted 
that many seem to have supposed that one motion or 
energy can be really changed into some other motion or 
energy. Then it apparently followed that the motion or 
energy in the organism could just as consistently be con- 
verted into the originated feeling. So it could just as 
consistently ; but it is a consistency of the kind which 
could suppose that the hollow inside of the teacup could 
become converted into the teacup itself, since they exist 
together with a common utility. 

Modes of motion, of energy, are convertible. Motions 
and energies are non-convertible. One mode of motion, 
through outside co-operation properly adapted in kind 
and amount, can be converted into almost any other kind 
of motion in any one of these marked off and limited or 
conditioned units — the ultimate atoms. But the motion 
or energy is exactly the something which marks off that 
atom and discriminates it without separating it from the 
absolute total of power. Hence if it were possible to 
transmute this proper atomic force into any other force, 
the process would abolish that atom of matter by abolish- 
ing its whole atomic constitution. 

But if we can only change one mode of motion into some 
other equivalent mode of motion, the two processes being 
like in kind and differing only in their ways of moving, 
what pertinency can there be in asserting that we can 
either transform a motion into a feeling, or a way of 
moving into a way of feeling. It would be as consistent 
to talk of transforming a May day into a May beetle and 
a May beetle back into a May day, because the two appear 
together and the day is helpful to the beetle. The feel- 
ing depends upon its correlated motion ; but so does the 



442 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

hollow in the teacup depend upon the teacup. Mutually 
correlated, they are not mutually convertible. 

When a man first lifts a large stone five feet into the 
air, then drops it over a precipice, sending it fifty feet 
lower down, there is some acknowledged change in the 
gravitative co-operation of the whole earth, and hence of 
the sun and all the rest of the solar system — to say 
nothing of the universe at large. The man lifted the 
stone and dropped it because he wanted it out of the 
way ; because he intended to plant a pear tree in the 
same spot before occupied by the stone. It is generally 
conceded that the change was made because the man 
desired to make it ; because he had a distinct purpose in 
causing it to be made ; and that he was the efficient cause 
of the change. 

But the stone was raised by sheer muscular power, and 
muscular power is as purely material as any other motive 
power ; and then the stone was pulled down entirely by 
gravitative power, which is also purely material. Or sup- 
pose the man raises the stone by the help of a derrick 
and lets it drop as before, unadulterated physical force 
is continuous throughout the process. To be sure, the 
man planned and constructed the derrick, expending a 
good deal of thought upon it in order to make the 
helpful pulleys of iron accomplish what his muscles 
alone were unable to do. All the same, both the 
lifting and the dropping of the stone is a material 
process from the beginning to the end ; and all the 
changes made by the stone, from the time when it lay 
at the top of the cliff up to the later period when it half 
buried itself at the bottom of the chasm, were material 
changes. 

Who insists that mind had anything whatever to do in 
the matter? Physical causes are not only adequate to do 
the entire work, but one can prove beyond question that 
they actually did the full consecutive work. 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT 443 

Does not that kind of reasoning sound a good deal like 
this : " Biological researches within the past few years 
have added vastly to our knowledge of protoplasm and 
its properties ; and there is no longer any question that 
its qualities are the expression of the various movements, 
chemical and physical, and belong to it simply as a chem- 
ical substance. ... It will suffice to show that such 
phenomena as assimilation and growth, movement and 
irritability or sensitivity, have antecedents of physical 
energy, in the same sense as the movements of an electric 
motor have physical antecedents in the electric currents, 
dynamos, steam-engine, and furnace. 

" The food of an animal consists almost altogether in 
highly complex molecular compounds. It may be said to 
be matter stored with energy. . . . When this has been 
digested and has done its work in the body . . . the 
energy has been distributed through the body, carrying 
on its various operations. There is first that of ordinary 
movement, which can be measured in foot pounds, as 
work of any kind may be. The blood in the arteries and 
veins has to depend upon a kind of hydraulic apparatus 
to keep it in motion. The temperature of the body 
demands a supply of heat measurable in heat units to 
maintain it, while the repair and waste going on through 
the whole body of all animals implies a distribution of the 
material necessary for the maintenance of the integrity of 
the tissues, as well as the separation and removal of the 
used-up material. . . . The energy for doing all this, of 
course, comes from the food, so the question is not as to 
its source and quantity, but it is : How is this transfor- 
mation in the body effected ? . . . This is the same as 
asking as to the mechanism in the body, by means of 
which energy supplied is transformed to meet the various 
wants of the body. . . . It is clear that the solution 
of every ultimate question in biology is to be found 
only in physics, for it is the province of physics to discover 



444 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

the antecedents as well as the consequents of all modes 
of motion." 1 

It is equally clear that every ultimate question in nature 
is to be found only in physics. Physics made the der- 
rick, physics worked the derrick, physics lifted the stone 
and dropped it, physics planted the farmer's pear tree, and 
physics will eat the pears when they ripen, and pure 
physics will expend the transformed energy of the pears 
in dancing at the next young people's evening entertain- 
ment. There will be only physics on hand to be entertained. 

This last re'sume' of physics, just issued from the press, 
is interpolated in the essay now going through the press, 
because of its characteristic logical lucidity. The help- 
less reasoning powers must either accept of their own 
reasoning as a pure physical act and a necessity, or else 
go forward to admit that mind may work with intra-organic 
energy upon the same essential basis on which it works 
with extra-organic agency. 

With some slight change of phraseology, the author's 
conclusions as to each and all of the separate facts may 
be fully accepted. But we believe with Professor Huxley 
that mind and volition " count for something " in the order 
of nature. The only real question is : How much or 
how little are we to count into that " something? " 

We hold it to be conclusive that, if the mind of a man 
can plan, construct, and operate a machine, and can cause 
his machine either to pulverize granite boulders or to 
twist the almost invisible threads of a cocoon spun by 
an insect, but utilized to clothe his wife and daughters, 
the same mind can write a Thanatopsis or a scientific 
treatise, provided it can command both the proper mental 
and material energy to enable it to accomplish the work. 
But the thought is an element quite as essential as the phy- 
sical process in both cases. As no machine was ever made 

1 Matter, Ether, and Motion, by A. E. Dalbear, Ph.D., Professor of 
Physics, Tuff ts College, pp. 282-297. 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 445 

without both the one and the other, and as the organism as 
a whole, as every organ in its own degree, and as every 
fibre and cell, if not every organic molecule, in a lesser 
degree, gives us very considerable evidence that it is an 
efficient machine of its own kind, adapted to do a work 
special to itself, it is possible that no organic molecule, no 
organ and no organism, was ever formed except through 
the non-material help of an active sensibility. 

Chemists have produced organic substances. Some of 
them are like the products of the organism's waste 
matters ; others are like the condensed foods stored eco- 
nomically in various parts of the system — especially in the 
neighborhood of an ovum destined to gain its earliest de- 
velopment by the help of the energy stored in these 
denser foods. But chemists have not yet created any 
substance in which there is an evident " continuous ad- 
justment of internal relations to external relations." It 
is exactly this kind of modified adjustment between the 
desire and its realization, recurrently sustained, which 
makes all really organized matter differ from all un- 
organized matter. The machine may be considered 
almost as an exception to this fundamental distinction 
between the organic and the inorganic. 

The machine actually mediates between the mind and 
the remoter portions of its co-operant ; it does this in an 
orderly predetermined manner and in that sense it is a 
species of organ of the mind which operates it. So are 
the written and spoken words which help to convey one 
mind's ideas to other minds. Language is a species of 
complex mechanism utilized to embody the thoughts and 
emotions of the living sensibility. The only reason why 
language and all other inventions do not entirely corre- 
spond to Spencer's definition of life is that the adjust- 
ments are not primarily " internal " in the machine, 
the chosen word, or the invention. The external relations 
have their actual correspondence between the mind as the 



446 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

feeling subject and themselves as object, while the ma- 
chines of all kinds are but the helpful mediums of com- 
munication between the desire and its realization. The 
nervous system, once organized, in its operations, has 
more of the characteristics of the machine. Perhaps the 
same may be said of the general action of the sensible 
organic functions, of all of the special organs. 

But throughout the organism in the process of assimi- 
lation and of related disassimilation the correspondence 
between the internal and the external is individual, as 
in all molecular compounding, yet it does not pertain to 
the dominant mind, if the correspondence is not actuated 
by conscious feeling. The conscious mind is the directive 
internal factor in correspondence with the external, where 
nerves, muscles, and the members generally mediate be- 
tween the mind and its object. Some organs like the 
heart work automatically in the same sense that outside 
machines do after they are once properly constructed and 
are efficiently supplied with working energy. 

There is a vast amount of other mechanical work very 
indirectly or not at all under the guidance of any active 
sensibility — as chemical action in general presumably is 
not. Of course the chemist, if skilful enough in provid- 
ing the right conditions, can obtain about the same results 
as the organism. But if the chemist could and should 
produce substances having direct internal and external 
continuous exchanges, not merely of dynamic modes, but 
equally of the co-operating tensions, for one, I should be- 
lieve that in such a fact there was evidence that the 
chemist had been able to reproduce conditions essentially 
like those which obtained when organisms were first evolved 
from the inorganic ; and that nascent co-operative desire 
was re-introducing the old dispensation when sensibility 
first became an efficient though an immaterial factor in 
the affairs of this planet. 

The inorganic world overflows with free motion both of 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 447 

molecule and of mass ; but nowhere throughout its entire 
realm are there modes of transformation which are the 
slightest advance over prior modes, in themselves con- 
sidered. Nowhere are there changes or processes which if 
reversed can properly be called retrogressive. Certainly 
there is a larger order which is proving itself able to utilize 
all changes ; but that is something quite apart from all 
purely mechanical co-operations. They all move along a 
perfect level where there is neither up nor down. 

But organization, from its simplest initiation onward, is 
always upwards tending ; and this difference we contend 
is because the organic method is inherently responsive 
to felt desire. Desire, in its whole nature is both an 
impulse and a successively directive impulse which is 
inherently cumulative. The machine is constructed 
because a mind consecutively desires to construct it. 
Language is employed for the same reason. All modifi- 
cations effected by organization are directly or indirectly 
produced by the copartnership of a felt desire, added to, 
but not subversive of, mechanical copartnerships. The 
rhythm of all mental activity, practically continuous 
push, co-operates effectively to so direct the unprogressive 
rhythm of motion that in organic structure there is a 
small real increment of structural gain, which, in its 
reaction upon mind, occasions a continuous mental 
evolution. 

Organic dissolution is not organic, but a return to in- 
organic process — the results of withdrawal of the efficient 
mental stimulus. 

As the hand can utilize the hammer in pounding, so the 
mind can utilize the brain in thinking ; and the mind 
directs the hand in the same sense that it directs the 
brain — by turning its desire, its volition, its thought, into 
adapted modes of sensibility. Then the soma, by its 
correlative motion-responses, sets all of the proper physical 
correlates into the right associated physical action. The 



448 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

hammer, a piece of condensed matter of prior formation, 
is yet used as an instrument in doing the chosen work ; 
but the nerves, muscles, and bones are equally of prior 
formation, though not equally dense, and are the inter- 
mediate instruments continuous in action between the 
mind and the hammer. But all of these are put into 
purposive or progressive motion by physical energy, which 
in nerve stimulation is called innervation. Some still freer 
energy is sent into the nerves, is transmitted to the ham- 
mer, and by the hammer is transmitted in blows to the 
substance pounded. 

It is this freer energy conveniently stored, probably in 
nerve ganglia, at any rate stored somewhere organically, 
which the mind through its soma calls into efficient action 
adjusted to its own changing sensibility. This sensibility, 
though acting through a vibratory mechanism, has its 
attention steadily fixed upon the work to be done. The 
determination or volition, the intention to do the work, 
sends onward the correlated physical pulses as the sun 
sends onward its radiant energy — in a practically continu- 
ous onflow. This energy is transformed from molecular 
to molar motion when the nerves and muscular fibres by 
co-operation move the whole arm in the molar swing 
which wields the hammer, or into the cling of the fingers 
which grasp the hammer. 

The mind causes all of these various actions and can 
cause them only because its soma has become com- 
plexly co-ordinated with them all. Its sole part 
is to call into action the appropriate intensions and 
then the correlated extensive modes — the mind's present 
co-operant — go forward objectively and accomplish the 
intended work. The mind initiates the process, and the 
materials have become so co-ordinated that they carry 
out the intention successfully. 

In thinking, the mind normally initiates the brain 
process ; but in revery and in some excited states of the 



THE MIND AND ITS CO-OPERANT. 449 

brain, when the thinking is said to be automatic, when 
the mind cannot directly stop the train of thought, and 
perhaps can do very little towards making the thinking 
sane and logical, the brain, by acting with the soma and 
compelling its modifications, in this way compels corre- 
lated emotions and thoughts. In this automatic thinking 
there is only a reversed or a partially reversed initiation of 
the co-operative process. It is as the hammer initiates 
pain when in some way impelled to give its blow to the 
muscles or as the object sends its light by reflection into 
the eye. The intermediate co-operators, after their 
method awaken the sensibility. 

But the brain is the mind's co-operant in all co-opera- 
tions immediately confined to intra-organic thought pro- 
cesses. We are constrained to say immediately, because 
not only the dynamic stimulus but the brain substance 
itself, both external to the mind, were derived from the 
extra-organic ; though they have now become a part of 
the mind's near coworking neighbors, and integral parts 
of the same organism. To the mind, they are its efficient 
thought promoters — the facile, co-ordinated, dynamic 
groups, so much more prone to motions than to tensions 
that in good conditions they obey its slightest intelligent 
behests, in its efforts to test the validity of its sensations 
by intelligently reproducing and re-relating them under a 
great variety of conditions. 

But if in this sense the brain is the organ of thought, 
in essentially the same sense, though in a more remote 
degree, corresponding to the greater remove and more 
transformations in space, the manufacturer's machine 
shop is the efficient organ of his manufacturing purposes. 

The brain is the mind's co-operant whenever the mind 
is in co-operation with it. But if the mind is asleep, if it 
has withdrawn or partially withdrawn from active work, 
the dynamic supplies are partialyshut off; the amount of 

blood in the brain is diminished, the eyes are closed, the 

29 



45o 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 



ears became dulled, and the mind, possibly by locking 
itself into close tensions by the help of some of its co- 
workers, is not now dynamically active, and has in sound 
sleep no active co-operant. The machine shop may be 
locked and inoperative in the same way. But in the con- 
stitution of things, no progressive work was ever origi- 
nated or performed without the intelligent intervention of 
mind in some nearer or more remote part of the process. 




IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OUT OF 
CONSCIOUSNESS. 

THAT the mind is far from being always in con- 
scious activity is well known to every one. If we 
accept the theory that mind is only presently conscious 
when by the help of its soma there is an active dynamic 
interchange between the somatic vibrators and those of 
its co-operant, so that the correlated mind becomes a 
sharer in such modifications, the various phenomena of 
consciousness, semi-consciousness, sub-consciousness, re- 
vived consciousness in memory, prolonged consciousness 
in all sensations, belated consciousness often following a 
mood of inattention, complex consciousness where the 
disparate senses bring their various energies to the soma 
simultaneously, double or triple consciousness, either si- 
multaneous or successive, unconscious cerebration, and any 
other phenomenon in close relation to mental activity, if 
there be any other similar complications, become entirely 
comprehensible. 

That the mind has a continuity of action, though often 
correlated to the continuous energizing of its soma in con- 
ditions of partial stress, when free motion has been trans- 
formed to tension, must be conceded. Such sensibility 
could hardly arise into a distinct consciousness and prob- 
ably cannot be recoverable in memory. At the risk of 
seeming to adopt inferences remote from verifiable truth, 
one may be permitted to express the hope, even the 
belief, that every individual is, and has been since it became 

451 



452 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

a correlative individuality, enjoying a low grade of generally 
pleasant nascent sensations. 

Is it objected that there is a condition the reverse of 
tension when energy is excessively dynamic, as in the 
surging vapors of the sun, when sensation should be cor- 
respondingly excessive ? Possibly ; but if so it can only be 
sensation repeated with the outflowing physical vibrations 
and having no relations to sensations like ours when the 
recipients of extreme heat. It remains certain that the 
most personal experience of a conscious grade can be 
acquired only through physical interco-operation ; as all 
modifications of the atomic rhythm must be acquired 
through active interchange of modes with some co-operant. 

However active and vivid may be mere sensibility, in 
any heated gas, the kind of sensibility can be in no sense 
intelligent, since none of the conditions under which 
intelligence is evolved or exercised are present. The 
evident fortuitous radiation of energy from all excessively 
dynamic gases — the giving its motion up to whatever trans- 
mitting medium will accept it, to be dissipated at random 
— indicates a purely mechanical action. Then, though we 
have no direct knowledge as to the more or less intimate 
nature of the co-operation between a transmitted free 
motion and the transmitting medium, yet, as the more 
perfect the medium, as a medium, the less the energy 
which it absorbs, we must suppose that the medium is in 
no way greatly changed or benefited by the transmission. 

A gas having the temperature of surrounding objects 
gives and takes equal quantities of free motion ; its 
physical molecule is so slightly compounded that its 
atomic properties are unchanged ; and apparently it has 
no co-operations of a kind to awaken anything more than 
a recurrent sensitiveness. Ether particles seem to be 
even less favorably placed for the evolution of a living 
experience, various in kind. 

Briefly, then, nozvhere except zvitJiin a living organism 



IN CONSCIO USNESS AND OUT OF CONSCIO USNESS. 45 3 

and nowhere within a living organism except in the one 
position where it can become the chief recipient of free mo- 
tions of every kind, and in return can command the organic 
store of energies needed for putting itself into active com- 
munication with objects to be known, can the latent possibili- 
ties of any mind become actively unfolded into an extensive 
and varied experience. Of course, under other equivalent 
conditions, the same or higher kinds of experience may be 
even more rapidly acquired ; but no such opportunities 
come within our direct cognizance. 

The mind must continuously communicate with the 
object in order to perceive the object as immediately pre- 
sented ; and in representation it must be able to com- 
mand a continuity of co-operation to enable it to repre- 
sent and relate its thoughts into a consistent and dependent 
whole. The organism provides the correlated structures 
adapted to the furtherance both of perception and of 
conception ; and it also provides the available energy for 
operating the various parts, the partially separate organs 
of what in reality is but one highly complicated mechanism. 
But mind, and mind only, can so co-operate with and 
direct the physical processes, both organic and extra- 
organic, as to enable itself to obtain sensations, percep- 
tions, cognitions, and any other mental apprehensions 
largely at its own discretion — so long as its discretion works 
in line with all other correlations. 

The part of the organism is simply that of providing 
the machine and the power with which to work the 
machine. In the higher organisms it does this only 
partially — attending only to the later stages of the work. 
The mind, in all organisms which are under the directive 
guidance chiefly of one mind, provides the raw material 
of foods and other energies to a very large extent. The 
organism completes the structural co-ordinations and the 
needful energy accumulations ; but even this is done 
under the lead of voluntary use of organs — the organs 



454 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

most used becoming complex and efficient structurally 
and most directly under the control of the one volition. 

The mere circumstance that in organic process the 
guiding intelligence works within the machine in such 
intimate relations with every part that the living sensi- 
bility seems to be, as probably it ordinarily is, in every 
part, is not fundamental enough to radically separate 
the organism as a machine from all other machines 
with which every rational mind succeeds in furthering its 
own plans and desires. In both cases it works with 
strictly mechanical implements and uses purely material 
energies as motive power. Moreover, these energies are 
transferred from one point to another within the organism 
and without the organism, upon one identical principle 
whenever the transfer is carried forward by a sensible 
movement ; and, as all will agree, molecular transfer must 
be essentially the same in method — that is, the energy 
goes forward with some moving part of the machine, and 
is handed over by it through impact with the receiving 
part, which in its turn carries it to the end of its route. 

Every one knows that the motion of the arm 
and hand which swing the axe, and the motion of 
the axe, are like in kind. So the motion within the 
optic nerve in vision and the motion between the 
eye and the object, equally essential to the same act of 
vision, is one continuity of motion pulses. In normal 
action there is evidence of but very little transformation 
of mode en route ; the mechanical co-operation is the same 
in kind within and without the organism. 

But the process in no sense creates the perception ; it 
is only of the kind which enables the co-operative latent 
perception to come into active exercise in correlation with 
the object perceived. The mind sees the object because an 
adapted continuous co-operation enables the intelligence 
to communicate with and in some degree to apprehend 
the object. The kind and the amount of the mental appre- 



IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 455 

hension will depend both upon the degree of the mind's 
already acquired intellect, and upon the kind and amount 
of energy in co-operation. And again the degree and 
variety of acquired knowledge must depend upon the com- 
plexity and structural efficiency of the brain, through 
which the mind more immediately co-operates. 

Thus an ox, when perceiving a tree, must have a very 
different kind of perception from a child ; and a child 
certainly has a very different one from a botanist like Asa 
Gray. Recognition is one thing when it attends to only 
a few inadequate superficial characters, and quite another 
when the mind has been able to so inter-relate many 
characters unlike in properties and functions, that the 
most casual glance at the object can at once call up and 
re-relate the thousand details into one co-ordinated whole. 
Of course such a perception is in part presentative and in 
part representative. But the illustration makes it evident 
that the mind is quite as much concerned in every per- 
ception and subsequent thought as matter is. 

The mind is able at will to see what it looks for, provided 
it is there to be seen, and provided the intermediate 
transmitters are in working continuity enough to carry the 
order from the mind to the object without transforming 
the correlative physical modes during the co-operative 
process. The ox looks at the tree in order to see if an 
available mouthful can be taken from a hanging branch, 
for its delectation. The ox gets the knowledge it looked 
for. Dr. Gray studied the tree — and a single glance suf- 
ficed — in order to get from it the knowledge desired by an 
experienced man of ready scientific methods. That deeper, 
more orderly perception could only belong to experience 
complexly developed and scientifically co-ordinated. 

The subsequent reflection, the relationing of phase to 
phase in thought, purely subjective on that side of the 
process, must have also its physical aspect — the continu- 
ously attendant motion-process carried on within the 



456 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

brain. It will be admitted that the higher brain is the 
organ of thought, and that unless it is in good working 
condition the thinking will be proportionately halting. 
With the weary brain, the thought must lag and perhaps 
fail of logical connection and fail in the firm grasp of the 
several parts of any related subject. With a diseased brain, 
the action of the mind may be as inconsequent as the move- 
ment of an arm is when the nerves are in great disorder. 
In darkness or in a heavy fog the vision is equally obscured. 

The mind and its present co-operant must be in adapted 
working conditions in order to furnish good and healthful 
mental results. All theories are equally ready to concede 
so much. 

Then if a mind is the indwelling consciousness in a 
rhythmic atom of many physical vibrators, some of which 
are more immediately co-operative with one group of 
nerve connections and their dependencies, and others with 
other groups, although the consciousness is one and the 
mental experience, whatever it may be, is the experience 
of one indivisible unity, this conscious unity may fail to 
relate in thought the experiences brought to it from the 
disparate channels of communication between itself and 
the outer world if the co-ordinating physical mechanism 
is in a misleading or otherwise disordered condition. 
Feelings are progressive and arise in time. 

While the mind may put itself into working connection 
with almost any part of its environment, organic or 
extra-organic, no mind can work efficiently in more than 
one or at most in two or three directed processes at the 
same time. Giving attention to anything, is the mind 
actively relating itself through its soma to that special ob- 
ject by a quickened physical process. If the process on the 
mental side pertains to eager present vision it cannot be 
simultaneously a process of deep reflection, which requires 
physical activity in quite other parts of the brain structure. 
Feeling is directed by alliance with directed motion. 



IN CONSCIO USNESS AND O UT OF CON SCI USNESS. 457 

Hence, if the physical working relations of a mind's 
possible successive co-operants are in a more or less cha- 
otic condition, the same mind being in two quite unlike 
states of consciousness at different times, because its 
experiences are gained by physical processes unlike in 
many of their manifestations, and now abnormally sepa- 
rated by some lesion or otherwise, so that each experience 
cannot so far revive the other as to show themselves to 
be two parts of one larger process, the mind itself may 
fail to recognize such conscious states as belonging to one 
inclusive consciousness. 

In conditions of bodily health we have nothing of a 
divided consciousness. All such phenomena belong to 
states of invalidism, trance, hypnotism, or some similar 
abnormal disturbed environment. Then, as the mind's 
co-operant in one phase of this half chaotic condition is 
decidedly marked off in process from the co-operant in 
another section of the abnormal condition, either the one 
state of experience is unable to recall the other or it re- 
calls it vaguely and perhaps associates the remembrance 
in an equally vague conception of an individuality not 
itself. Besides, when all of the circumstances are thor- 
oughly sifted, it will often be found that the observer 
attributes much more definiteness to such approximate 
insanities than the facts will fully warrant, and more than 
the sufferer would entirely endorse. 

We know that some mental activities are suspended in 
sleep, while other processes may be carried on even more 
vigorously than usual ; and we know that it is not always 
the same class of so-called " faculties " which sleep nor the 
same which remain actively awake. On the contrary, there 
is in feverish and disordered sleep often a curious kaleido- 
scope of thoughts, emotions, and purposes mixed in the 
most various proportions ; and facts and fancies mingle 
in miscellaneous confusion. 

The recalling of such dreams must generally be done 



458 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

hastily on awaking while the condition which produced 
them still partially remains. Afterwards they may utterly 
vanish from memory in its fully awake condition. If one 
of the more sane of such dreams could in any way be 
brought to the waking mind of the dreamer, and he be 
assured that it was a real experience of somebody (as 
indeed it was), he would be ready to affirm confidently that 
it certainly was not his experience. We do not credit him 
with being, therefore, one person in the dream and quite 
another when fully awake. Yet an incident of that kind 
differs in no essential feature from the much talked of 
double consciousness of an epileptic, who seems to live one 
life in one state of health and quite another life in a differ- 
ent physical condition. The " split-off" consciousness is 
as real in the one case as in the other ! And if some con- 
dition could be arrived at in which the mind's entire 
progressive experiences could be fully recalled by memory, 
can there be the slightest doubt that both the split-off 
dream and the split-off second or third mimic personality 
would be found perfectly to correlate themselves into one 
unity of consciousness ? The splitting-off processes have 
been caused by failures in physical, not mental correlations. 

The somnambulist not only dreams, but he carries his 
dream into action: he evidently experiences every detail 
of the situation imagined, as realizingly as he ever does a 
waking experience. Even many a vague waking revery 
with its impossible incidents, which seem to create them- 
selves and to relate detail to detail of their own option, 
are as remote from rational modes of thinking by the 
alert mind as the thoughts of a child are from what will 
be his manner of thinking fifty years later. 

Yet one can hardly be supposed to jump out of his own 
personality whenever he falls into an imbecile revery from 
weariness and inattention ! The tired but excited brain 
accepts the situation very much as it does when the vision 
has become over-tired by visual impressions and the or- 



IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 459 

ganism keeps on presenting its " after-images," positive 
and negative. The sections of the brain related to thought 
set up their motion reflections, and their unguided pulses 
of energy sent into the soma call up related thought which 
may become as feeble and inconsequent as the aimlessness 
of the excitation requires it to be. Clear discrimination 
is asleep. 

Anaesthetics have power to so far disconnect the dis- 
tinct consciousness and the sensibility generally co-oper- 
ative with the organism that one's body may be lacerated 
or sawn asunder part from part and the mind remain 
without feeling it. In hypnotism the volition loses self 
direction and follows every suggestion of the operator 
with a species of fatalistic necessity. Sometimes the mind 
seems to be as much withdrawn from the ordinary nerves 
of sensation as it is when under the influence of a narcotic ; 
and there is a suggestive coincidence in the fact that it can 
be made to realize any abnormal class of mentally induced 
sensations with the utmost ease and vividness. 

Thus, at a hint from the operator, the hypnotized can 
taste of choice wines and viands, can listen to music which 
has no objective counterpart, can see and converse equally 
well with absent or with purely imaginary persons ; and, 
in a word, he is able to make every suggestion a distinct 
subjective reality. He is working with a new efficient 
co-operant and the usual channels of communication are 
closed. 

There is an authentic case — never given to the public 
so far as I know — of a highly intelligent and generally 
well balanced person, partially paralytic, who at times be- 
lieves that one of the poor paralyzed hands is a distinct 
individual by itself and desires to have it properly intro- 
duced to a friend who may be present. No one could 
probably be found who would seriously contend that this 
nerveless hand has succeeded in setting up an individu- 
ality of its own, yet the remnant of sensibility which 



460 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

clings to it has been so split off from a recognized correla- 
tion with the remaining consciousness that it is seriously 
mistaken for another separate being. Restored health 
would certainly restore the appreciation of the unity of the 
complex experience. 

If we attend carefully to the simultaneous incoming of 
stimulus through different senses, we shall find that it is 
possible to recognize the several sensations while they are 
yet distinct in directions of perceived oncoming, if not 
each still quite distinct in kind ; or, by attending to them 
all with a steady impartiality, voluntarily holding the at- 
tention in a waiting attitude, touch, taste, hearing, smell- 
ing, and seeing may all, or any two or three of them, 
become blended in a common sensibility in which the 
several kinds of sensations are almost if not quite indis- 
tinguishable. The experiment is a difficult one to make 
because of the readiness with which attention turns in the 
direction of one or other of the senses, and the mental 
readiness to induce the sensation expected to arise. 
Nevertheless no one who will carefully investigate in that 
direction can fail to discover that the mind can present 
itself to itself as a co-ordinated worker through various 
channels ; and as able so to divide its attention that it 
may become receptive of sensations through several of 
these, not entirely in a serial order, but in identical time, 
yet in such correlation that under normal conditions the 
affirmation is positive : / see, / taste, /hear ! It is a con- 
ditioned consciousness. 

There is but one affirmation as to the inseparable unity 
of the experience ; yet it is a unity which admits and 
which even demands a co-existent variety. This is true 
not merely of those experiences directly dependent upon 
the sense co-operants, but back in the organic depths where 
pure relationing is carried on and the rational mind is in 
the ascendant, two or more ideas can present themselves 
together. This is an ideal species of presentation, the 



IN CONSCIO USNESS AND OUT OF CONSCIO USNESS. 46 1 

observer cognizing by insight rather than by sight. 
Whether two or more actual reproductions of external 
forms or similar representations can be mentally realized 
in the same identical moment is more doubtful. These 
require a directed attention with concentration of personal 
effort. But in that stage of thought where ideas come 
as spontaneously from organic excitation as sensations do 
from outside stimulus, likenesses and contrasts often stand 
together ; not as one behind the other, but literally as side 
to side in an equally clear mental focus. 

Also the mind can intelligently relate a thought which 
is distinctly within the consciousness with another which 
is partially outside, as in some dimmer antechamber ; and 
it can do this not by turning from the one to the other, 
but by attending to both in the same act ; almost precisely 
in the same sense in which several or dozens of objects 
can be perceived in the same glance, while perhaps only 
one of the number is directly in the focus of the visual 
attention. 

No mind could count all of these dozens of objects at 
the instant ; but it can count most of them subsequently 
by calling them into a more distinct consciousness as 
memories. This shows that they were really observed at 
the time, though observed only vaguely by a species of 
semi-consciousness recipient of the inflowing energy, but 
not actively attentive enough to become a full intellectual 
act. A similar semi- or sub-consciousness may attend all 
kinds of thought processes. 

One can at any time test these interesting facts for him- 
self. He will find it to be quite possible to hold the eye 
steady enough to assure himself that without turning from 
object to object he can really perceive — perhaps it would 
be more correct to say he can get the sensation of — 
several objects in one identical moment. An onlooker 
might recognize motion in the eye not appreciated by the 
person trying the experiment ; but to conclude, as has 



462 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

been done, that this indicates a necessary turning from 
one thing to another in the attempt to perceive four or 
five objects of small size, must be unwise unless the experi- 
ment has been so often repeated that all meaningless 
nervousness has entirely disappeared. 

One sensible object sends its light from billions of points 
all brought to the common focus. The still outlying rays 
sent from other bodies in the larger region of obscure 
vision yet manage to report themselves in the correspond- 
ing domain of obscure consciousness. These different 
degrees of vision illustrate what might be called direct and 
oblique co-operation between the mind and its co-operants. 
If the soma is the rhythmic atom we have assumed, even 
these slightly differentiated visions, with more and less 
distinctness of visual impressions, may be supposed to 
enlist different somatic vibrators in their several co-opera- 
tions. 

The same theory would lead to the conclusion that all 
" unconscious cerebration," the psychical results of which 
may subsequently emerge into the distinct consciousness 
bringing in a thought which seems to have sprung from 
nowhere in some mysterious way, is a parallel example 
with that of the outlying field of dim vision. 

The soma, hence the mind, is taking an obscure part in 
some outlying physical process which is either so remote 
or so vague and indecisive in its methods that the mind's 
attention is but little enlisted. It is like motion in any 
field of force which diminishes with the distance so that 
the co-operation is not counted in practical estimates ! In 
such processes the sensibility enlisted, if any, is sub-con- 
scious ; yet an added stimulus, which will waken the whole 
process into activity, awakens also an intelligent recogni- 
tion of any recognizable objective data which have entered 
into the co-operation. Such phenomena only mean that 
there are degrees of mental co-operation in remote pro- 
cesses in precise correspondence with the small amounts 



IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 463 

of material co-operation. The brain, though occupying 
so limited an area, is yet representative of indefinite miles 
of nerve fibre, so that if traversed by pulses of any forms 
of free motion, the representative remoteness, complexity, 
and possible commutations are amply provided with 
material for the reproduction of all objective correlations. 

In memory, especially after the lapse of a long interval 
between a particular experience and its revival, the physi- 
cal co-operant must have become much changed by the 
going out of waste elements and the coming in of new. 
It is not needful that the mind should have the identical 
coworkers helping it to recollect, that it had when acquir- 
ing the original experience. The old man of ninety who 
recalls the incidents of his ninety years must be working 
with almost wholly new materials; the correlativity of 
parts and methods has been conserved just as it would be 
in an army in which new recruits have replaced the old 
ones so that the captain is in charge of an entirely 
distinct body of men. The army regulations also may 
change yet the captain remain. 

The laws of association teach us that it is not needful for 
the event and the memory of it to employ even the same 
formal medium. One class of nerve connections can 
relate the mind to the event, and quite another revive 
the memory of it. Thus one may hear in the distance an 
impressive strain of music and forget it for years, yet 
recall it vividly again on coming into a room where there 
is another instrument of the same kind, though this one 
is entirely silent. No theory of an organic consciousness 
can fairly explain multitudes of facts like this. Nor can 
that theory really explain any of the facts of memory ex- 
cept those not usually reckoned as memory — the prolong- 
ing of sensible effects long enough to relate the past to the 
present and that to the future in direct mental apprehen- 
sion and comparison. Also in all thought processes there 
is prolonged duration of thoughts. 



464 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Remembered and anticipated feeling take hands across 
the present in every sensation. In every process of 
reasoning a broad complex present seems to be spread 
out in one domain of illumined recognition as literally 
as a related landscape is spatially unfolded under the eye 
of sense. The material co-ordinations, in their working 
harmony, come in here in explanation of the correspond- 
ing mental phenomena. But when a mind, after the 
lapse of fifty years, recalls an associated past, the memory 
must be purely mental although the mind is dependent 
upon some adapted material co-operant to aid in reviving 
the adapted somatic modifications. 

We hear much of recorded or registered impressions — 
the register being the physical organism. As reasonably 
might we talk of recording army traditions in the physical 
systems of the new recruits — the recording being handed 
on from the veterans to their successors. Traditions can 
certainly be handed down from man to man ; and we not 
only freely admit, but earnestly maintain, that such tra- 
ditions can be communicated only through physical 
channels. 

Nevertheless, the real content of every tradition is a 
mental perception. The giver and the receiver of the 
proposition, of the ideas which it puts into correlation, must 
communicate through the physical media of language 
spoken, written, or manifested in gesture. We maintain 
also that the original experience and the revived memory 
of it can be brought into mental correlation only through 
co-operating physical media. 

But the media between the experience and its recall 
into consciousness, of necessity, are no more the same 
substances than a command given by an army officer to 
his men in Virginia nearly thirty years ago, repeated on 
the Indian Reservation frontier five years ago to a new 
set of men, not three of whom were the same as formerly, 
or repeated to-morrow to a regiment in which every 



IN CONSCIO USNESS AND OUT OF CONSCIO USNESS. 465 

soldier will be a young man under thirty, would repeat- 
edly call into action the same identical muscles or the 
same atmospheric media. The sounds embodied in the 
language would be similar, and the ideas expressed and 
conveyed might be identical. 

It is time that philosophical science should carefully 
discriminate between things which differ as totally as 
feelings and motions do in every thinkable respect. It 
is time to take fully into account the indisputable fact that 
one and the same process may include radically different 
aspects of changes ; and that these unlike aspects are no 
more convertible into each other than a mathematical 
angle can be converted into a mathematical line, or vice 
versa. It is time to clearly recognize two distinct facts : 

1. That every physical process, from the inherent 
nature of motion, is forever continuous, however variously 
compounded. As motion it will either continue on in 
space, or it will turn back and so maintain its continuity 
in that way as vibration. If anything should intervene 
in any other than a directive sense, and break up this 
literal continuity of each and every motion, it would 
arrest and annihilate the motion itself. Hence, in the 
nature of the case, no emotion can so intervene. 

2. Sensibility, regarded as continuous life and its 
modifications, is also an unbroken continuity though 
not an unbroken self-consciousness, because its living 
experiences are conditioned with and are dependent 
upon the physical modifications, upon the motor modes 
of the same individuality ; and motions, through their 
material co-operation, are often thrown into conditions of 
stress which partially inhibit their actual changes. In 
these conditions the higher grades of feeling are also in- 
hibited. The mind is in partial sleep or semi-consciousness. 

Hence, though each mind is the sensibility side of its 
own soma, the somatic modifications, if varied helpfully 
in any way from their original rhythm, can only extend 



466 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

the domain of their co-operative activities by receiving — 
during such processes — a continuous inflow of dynamic 
energies, which enables them either literally or in effect to 
extend their own modes co-operatively into every part of 
the process. Whenever this is done the innate mind has 
also a correspondingly active sensation or cognition. The 
mind's experiences may be either presentative or repre- 
sentative ; but in the one case the soma must be in active 
relations with the perceived object, and in the other it 
must be in even more energetic relations with the repre- 
sentative or reproducing structures of a highly organized 
brain. But mind only can reproduce actual thought, 
mind only can represent ideally what mind alone originally 
perceived. Hence, in all of the higher mental experiences, 
the mind must take the initiative and direct the physical co- 
operations not only of its own soma but of the entire active 
co-operant. 

Let us turn back then to the phenomena of memory 
and the assumed organic registration of experiences. 

A blank sheet of paper can undoubtedly be made a 
register Of thought ; but how can living and changing tissue 
become such a register? Can motion ever really express 
a feeling ? The words written or printed on the blank 
sheet are only symbols or substitutes representing ideas, 
and they must be reinterpreted by any other mind — that 
is, they must be retranslated back into thought. The 
physical is the medium between one mind and another, 
and the physical can be nothing more than the medium 
between the mind which knows and any object which be- 
comes known ; then, whether the object is a first experience 
or a revived experience, the organism can only act as the 
medium for consciously relating them to each other, for 
presenting them as one in thought, in a common unity of 
consciousness. 

When any experience is often repeated, physical and 
mental become so mutually adapted in working connec- 



IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 467 

tions that all subsequent co-operation becomes more and 
more easy and agreeable. All co-operations between sub- 
ject and object tend to establish such pathways of ready 
communication. These constitute the " lines of least 
resistance " ; and the mind in every organism, by its 
habitual activity, whether of a high or a low order, 
must in time establish networks of lines of easy motor 
communication both between itself and the objective 
world and also between the different phases of its own 
mental world. 

Hence the action of association in reviving past ex- 
periences. Any familiar track becoming itself innervated 
readily sends its surplus energy into whatever other chan- 
nel it was once associated with. Also it may call up any 
number of familiar events by establishing an active con- 
tinuity of process, each event suggesting another or several 
others, and the organism successively responding to the 
somatic modifications. But all phenomena of this class 
arise from present active co-ordinations, and the present 
can reintroduce the past because both past and present are 
in correlation in the same living sensibility. To be in 
consciousness is to be active in present time ; but the domain 
of an individual consciousness or sensibility as a whole 
extends over an unlimited time ; as shown both by the 
bringing back into consciousness its past experiences so 
illumined that it recognizes them as its own, and by its 
confident anticipations for the future successively fol- 
lowed by the actual realization. 

But the co-operant, having no active share in these sub- 
jective feelings, may be totally changed in every element 
and in every mode, organic and inorganic, provided it will 
work in such correlations as will enable the mind to so 
direct and modify its processes as to revive its past 
experiences at will, and in general to carry out its various 
and increasing desires. Because the mind must be so 
circumstanced that it can control an efficient and adapted 



468 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

co-operant in good working condition or fail in the present 
realization of orderly complexly related experiences, a 
memory revived and consciously co-ordinated after fifty 
years must presuppose satisfactory organic conditions. 

But is it logical or thinkable, the assumption that the 
organism has registered or could be made to register any 
feeling whatever ? It can register the scar of a wound or 
any other physical fact related to a maintained condition 
of tensions, because the old elements and modes are 
replaced by substitutes which to a large extent assume 
their duties and methods so that the general co-ordinations 
are still maintained. 

This is more true on the whole in the organic than in 
the inorganic domain, because the newly introduced 
elements are more nearly like in kind, and the maintained 
conditions are all more pliable and wider in their range. 
In the so-called petrifaction of organic substances, minerals 
replace the organic elements ; but in the progressive 
replacing of scars and malformations, however produced, 
in the maintained smallest details of all features, and even 
in the parasitic foreign, growths, as warts and moles, the 
replacing elements are organic in kind. There is no con- 
siderable change of density, and except that the organic 
whole is either gaining in co-ordinated power or losing it 
in age or sickness, the new and the old working correla- 
tions would remain almost entirely unchanged. 

There is a period in healthful middle or past middle life 
when practically there are no considerable changes in the 
organic sensible characteristics. In childhood the features 
change with growth, and the acquired defects may become 
nearly or quite obliterated ; at the period of decline they 
sometimes accumulate or become more marked. But 
what real parallelism is there between these explainable 
physical facts, largely static in kind, and the processes of 
memory, which in all of the co-operative aspects are almost 
purely dynamic? 



IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 469 

It is a false analogy which has reasoned from such facts 
which in the nature of things can pertain only to the main- 
tenance — shall we say to the inheritance ? — of the forms 
and functions of the tensions of an organism to the almost 
purely dynamic processes which unquestionably accom- 
pany all kinds of sensibility, memory included. How 
large a share has dense matter in the processes of hear- 
ing? or seeing? or thinking? or remembering? 

Static modes may register characters ; dynamic modes 
hasten to transform themselves into new forms by ex- 
changing the old ones with their neighbors. They are 
not the staying factors, but the promoters of incessant 
changes. Because experience is the endless play of ever 
varying feeling, it must be able to correspondingly relate 
itself to ever varying motion so extensive and so well co- 
ordinated that it is available in the service of the mind in 
every emergency and in the furtherance of every purpose. 
Hence the need of every mind for a pliant organism to 
mediate between subjective knowledge and control, and 
objects known and controlled. But what likeness is there 
between feeling and motion ? Except the one bond of 
correlation between them, nothing. What single charac- 
ter have they in common ? Think of changing a simple 
quiver, a shake to and fro, into living, keen enjoyment ! 
into a knowledge of methods and principles ! The terms 
of such propositions are hopelessly incongruous. 

Then, should we admit the possibility of registering 
experience in an organism which might revive it when 
properly stimulated, how could the changed tissues of fifty 
years later recall experience which they certainly never 
possessed ? No rational explanation has been given, or can 
be given, of an organic memory extending from childhood 
through a long life. Think of a stream of experiences, 
staying behind, when the whole organism serves but as a 
framework for the inflowing and outflowing elements 
which constitute the physical stream of changes ! The 



470 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

climax of unthinkableness is reached when the attempt is 
made to relate the experiences at one end of this stream 
to those at the other end in a consciousness able to 
recognize both the experience and the memory of it as 
inhering in a common sensibility. 

Unless this sensibility is, like the physical unit, so con- 
stituted that all of its processes are a normal return upon 
themselves, and however widely this normal return may 
be modified by co-operations yet soon or late it must be 
effected, there seems to be no way of really accounting for 
the facts of memory. With the theory of a rhythmic sen- 
sibility correlated with the ultimate rhythm of motion, 
all experiences become explainable and credible. A living 
experience must be indestructible. 

One sometimes seems to lose all consciousness in a 
dreamless sleep, yet on resuming the waking life there 
is no sense of a break in the continuity of the sensibility ; 
its inactivity was only partial, as though held in check by 
a limiting co-operant. When one recalls a forgotten 
dream or a happening to which no realized attention was 
paid, he begins to recognize that there are degrees of 
mental action, and that to be now in consciousness means 
to be in present, in active co-operation with some adapted 
co-operant. In recalling something with which no asso- 
ciations have been established, the brain is put into the 
most active exercise possible, that it may search out for 
us the physical track of the original experience. When 
that is re-excited, the memory arises in correlation. 

But to suppose that feeling can travel as a form, a 
shape, a pulse of change, as free motion does ; that in any 
sense it can become a free feeling and go from one to 
another as motion can, is to suppose a kind of process 
which certainly has not been clearly apprehended. We 
have an ever repeated confirmation of the necessity that, 
in the communication of ideas to others, we shall in some 
way embody the ideas ; that we literally must " incarnate " 



IN CONSCIO USNESS A ND OUT OF CONSCIO USNESS. 47 I 

them in something physical ; and that we must contrive 
somehow to introduce that physical something into a 
process which will reach the recipient as a form of physi- 
cal change. We may speak the thought and let it go 
almost directly onward as sound ; we may write the 
thought, another may reproduce the writing in print, and 
a third read the words to the listener who receives them. 
Such a progress may be extremely roundabout, but it is 
a continuous dynamic and static correlation of physical 
process between writer and reader. A raised eyebrow, a 
smile, any expression of the face, may serve the purpose 
of communication ; but something physical it must be if 
our reasoning is a legitimate explanation of the facts. 

The belief and the expectation of actual thought-trans- 
ference in any other way must belong either to pure 
idealists or to pure materialists — provided the believers 
are self-consistent. Yet it is entirely possible very much 
as one mind can open distant communication with a 
remote object, which it perceives by the help of the free 
motion light, it may learn so to command physical energies 
that by impressing upon them — that is, by actively 
giving them, certain modes of motion, insensible in kind, 
these modes may travel to the recipient, and by modify- 
ing his somatic changes awaken the same ideas in the re- 
ceiving mind with those in the mind of the experimenter. 

There may be such a possibility, though if so we have 
not yet reached a stage where it can be of much utility. 
Something not altogether unlike this mode of giving a 
bias to another mind by the communication of insensible 
energies, seems to be going on universally as one of the 
factors in hereditary transmission of mental tendencies ; 
but here the dynamic is transformed into the static. 

That the parent's mind can give a bent to the child's 
— as it unquestionably does — in any other way than by 
arranging for it, insensibly and unconsciously, the right 
structural co-ordinations and establishing within them 



472 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

physical tendencies which react upon the co-operating 
mind of the child, is vastly improbable. Each mind is 
complete in itself and can inherit nothing except directive 
impulses, produced by adapted stimulation. But as en- 
vironment, as easily excited co-operant, the inherited 
trend of organization, the product of a co-operation of 
causes in which parental sentient characters and tendencies 
certainly play important parts, physical heredity will 
undoubtedly develop or tend to develop mental similari- 
ties. The child is so circumstanced that he will probably 
resemble the parent as much in mental traits as in physi- 
cal likenesses. 

In the complexity of the many factors, the result may 
or may not be striking either physically or mentally. 
And then education, as an active and perhaps an almost 
continuous present influence, may become more efficiently 
potent than the hereditary bias. In a world where the 
active processes are continuous changes, the inherited 
constitution need not remain the strongest influence in 
the formation of character. By educating in accord with 
Nature's methods, educators can certainly command 
potencies which will so remould at once the growing body 
and mind that the engrafted bias will become more for- 
mative than that of the wild olive stock. But supple- 
menting mental influence the educator must use physical 
media as the shaping implements through which he is to 
remould the plastic material and mental characters of his 
pupils. 

It is not simply the environment, but the relative co- 
activity of the different parts of the environment as 
brought into co-operation with a mind and its organism, 
which becomes the strongest formative influence. Laura 
Bridgman, shut into the one sense of feeling, is com- 
pelled to interpret every object, every thought, and every 
emotion, through contrasts in nearness, remoteness, and 
the varying strengths of impacts. Because she could do 






IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 473 

this successfully, is evidence that mind in itself is directive 
efficiency. It is actively ready for increased manifold 
experience. If this cannot be gained through the usual 
channels, there must be redirection of the mental ener- 
gizing. 

In a broader sense, everything depends upon impact 
— that is, upon contact of varying amounts. The amount 
of pressure in such experiences through touch represents 
the amount of free motion communicated to the recipient. 
And all of the senses, transmitting special pulses of free 
motion, do this through what is practically a prolonged, 
varying pressure. Hence free motion so communicated, 
if freighted with an intelligent meaning, and if more 
active and more persistent, may become more formative 
than any prepotent tendencies. It is the active processes 
kept most influentially and steadily in consciousness, and 
not in the more quiescent sleeping chambers of the sensi- 
bility, which become the great educational regenerators, 
both in self-education and in all other attempts to stimu- 
late the desirable and repress the undesirable. 

Thought communicated in any way to one's mind is 
often profoundly influential because the intellect — which 
perhaps would not have discovered the ideas for itself — 
beginning to work upon that mental plane may go on 
living and relationing for itself upon the same higher 
level of experience. Thus every social atmosphere is im- 
measurably formative to most characters. Mind educates 
mind. 

The difficulties which perplex the whole subject of 
volition, of " free will," would melt into consonance if we 
kept in view the difference between in consciousness and 
out of consciousness as applied to motives as well as to 
every other kind of experience. We choose the motives 
which influence conduct as much and in much the same 
sense in which we choose the objects which will become 
associated with us in vision or in any other class of sensa- 



474 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

tions. By effecting the proper adjustments between our- 
selves and our co-operants, taught by experience, we may 
bring in or keep out from present consciousness the 
motives by which we desire to be stimulated or which we 
desire to suppress and keep in the background. 

To hold that a mind must act as impelled by the 
strongest motive, is like assuming that if the enjoyment 
of scenery from a mountain height is greater than from a 
shut-in valley, therefore, because one desires the greatest 
enjoyment, he must live on the mountain top. Motives 
are as manifold as enjoyments ; and no rational mind can 
tie itself to a single motive or even to one closely related 
group of motives. 

Motives are mental presentations or representations 
to be redistributed like any other relations. By holding 
any pleasure, any value, any excellence, for oneself or 
others, engagingly represented in the consciousness, de- 
sire may be stimulated and purpose impelled in the direc- 
tion for obtaining it. On the contrary, by repressing and 
banishing from active consciousness any line of thought 
or conduct which the unbiassed judgment disapproves, we 
also put the allied motives into an equally obscure back- 
ground. The motives which influence conduct which 
lead up or down or steadily onward in the line of experi- 
ence, are no more continuously under direct mental 
cognizance than are any other phases of the sensibility. 

" Out of sight, out of mind," is far more true in the 
inner than in the outer world because more directly under 
personal volition and control. The substitution of an 
antagonistic interest is the surest method of banishing 
and defeating any undesirable motive. Sleep, in health- 
ful conditions, is the neutral ground from which all 
soliciting motives can be effectively warded off. The 
newly awakened and refreshed mind can then outline a 
course approved by the judgment ; and if taught to 
work steadily in line with nature, it can choose its own 



IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 475 

motives as definitely as it can choose the direction of its 
thoughts, its emotions, or its daily conduct in any other 
respect. All habits may be outgrown. 

One's motives are as much a growth of the general 
sensibility as any other phase of a living experience. As 
we can turn away from perceiving any given object 
possible to sight, so can we turn from or towards any 
interest possible to the more direct mental vision, if we 
learn how. 

The weak will can be strengthened ; but only by making 
it help to strengthen itself. It must learn how it ca7i set 
to work, in line with all co-operative processes leading in 
the direction of success. No mental gain can be acquired 
in any other way than by an orderly progression. Voli- 
tion is no differently related to Nature's co-operative 
processes than any other experience — than sensation, 
perception, imagination, memory. There is one mind and 
all these are its experiences — modified by the nature and 
modes of the co-operant. As reasonably teach a weak- 
minded man that he can never learn wisdom, as to teach 
him that he must follow the strongest soliciting tempta- 
tion. Though it may have come actively into conscious- 
ness he can push it out by a dozen antagonized motive, 
provided he has been persistently taught in what way to 
go to work. 

Educators upon the right practical basis can strengthen 
childish and weak volitions on the same principle by which 
they strengthen perception, emotion, intellect, reason. 
Self-control in practical conduct, scientifically taught, 
would be by far the most important and the most effective 
of all sciences. It must be taught and learned, little by 
little, in the same way with other knowledge and under 
the best available conditions. Every mental acquirement, 
beginning with no experience, must gradually accumulate 
both the knowledge and the methods of applying it to 
practical purposes. 



476 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

But to interpret any process which can be changed,, 
directed into some mode which otherwise it would not 
have taken, as pertaining to a fixed, a changeless neces- 
sity, is palpably illogical. Physical nature is indefinitely 
modifiable, provided intelligence learns to produce all such 
modifications simultaneously in all of the direct correlates. 
Remoter correlates can then readjust themselves without 
difficulty. In this way the primitive earth has been 
largely transformed. 

But the organic domain has been much the most im- 
pressively modified physically, in structure and in func- 
tion ; and its mental experience has been exclusively pure 
gain — something entirely over and above all physical trans- 
formations, while dependent on them, as they in turn are 
dependent on human volition. 

The experienced intellect has already acquired an 
immense mastery over physical forces. And the still 
weak minds and weaker volitions will be led onward 
along the same pathway as soon as science has learned in 
theory, and all educators have learned in practice, that the 
emotions, the intellect, and the will are not three faculties, 
but three methods of mind application, and that they are 
all correlated with the unlimited modifiability of matter on 
one and the same general plan. 

They must each alike assume a progressive directive 
control by means of a growing structural co-operant, 
which in the nature of the case begins organically, but 
which may be continuously prolonged to the ends of the 
earth. Steam and electricity are now the mediating free 
motions which do the most effective external work. To 
control them demands as much purpose and will as intel- 
lect ; and perhaps as much feeling, of a highly disciplined 
kind, enters into the pursuits of great business enterprises 
and into intellectual work as into any dilettante's aesthetic 
enjoyments, into any fine lady's sensibilities, or into any 
sensualist's debasing gratifications. 



IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 477 

The world is all before them what to choose, but unless 
the masses learn how to choose and how to use, every- 
where supplementing individual power by more effective 
co-operating powers, their own sentient gains must be 
small and their impress upon the associated worlds of mind 
and matter equally insignificant. 

That some actual knowledge has been gained concerning 
mind and matter and their co-operations is proved by the 
control acquired over them, by the transformations 
which, from a savage wilderness and a savage humanity, 
have evolved a civilization as good as that of average 
Christendom. But the diversity of beliefs and assump- 
tions has tended to create a general impression that 
actual knowledge is not an assured possibility ; that 
truth and error are forever destined to interpenetrate 
and commingle. 

Doubtless forever and forever we shall know only in 
part. In that sense, the known must be interpenetrated 
by the unknown. But if we can consistently comprehend 
that what each one of us knows is the kind and the amount 
of literal cognition brought exclusively to oneself by his 
own co-operant, we shall be able to admit that his knowl- 
edge, in that sense, is accurate and complete. He knows 
just as much and just as little of the actual world as he 
has been able to bring into his intelligent consciousness. 
If he has failed in relating himself to the most important 
facts and realities, he has failed. If he has mistaken 
fancies for facts, he has mistaken them. If he has been 
disingenuous ; if he persistently would look in but one 
crooked and narrow line of investigation, his cognitions 
are equally mean and perverse. If he has a sick brain 
which presents him with spectres and other delusions, 
there is only one help for him. He must grow a healthier 
and a better brain, or separated from his organism he 
must seek elsewhere till he can find a more helpful and 
reliable co-operant. 



478 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Meantime there are millions of millions of minds 
perfectly capable of truly knowing, of comprehending 
and effectively relationing, many objective realities of 
every kind. They need nothing except efficient cowork- 
ers to relate them as minds which can know to 
objective data which can be known ; to enable them to 
acquire actual and adequate knowledge. And those who 
gain even glimpses of such knowledge can see eye to eye ! 
They can intelligently prove their positions to the increas- 
ing general satisfaction. 

To every individual there is the entire outlying objective 
universe of mind and matter — a universe always ready to 
do its own share in presenting itself to the apprehension 
of each and every one. It is too large to present itself 
directly as one total, too complex to present all of its 
phases simultaneously to one perception, and too brightly 
versatile to become the coworker of the stolid or the indif- 
ferent. But it is unwearied in its reiterated affirmations 
concerning every detail of its own efficient reality. 




THE ONE AND THE MANY. 



THE deepest consciousness which we have, the one 
abidingness which underlies all modes of the everchan- 
ging sensibility, is the sense of the persisting power, by- 
means of which all changes are effected. Whatever 
special group of feelings may come into the active con- 
sciousness, whatever we do to things external to our- 
selves, and whatever is said or done to us, is not only a 
manifestation to us of the special changes involved, but 
it is a manifestation also of the immanent power which 
remains unchanged in the midst of its clusters of cor- 
related changes. We recognize this essential power, force, 
or energy, as the one efficiency in every change, we realize 
it in our own sensibility, and we know it as the persisting 
effectiveness presented to us in every outlook into 
the not-me. 

The merest child perceives and shows that he perceives, 
at once, the something done and the power at work. 
The essential nature of power, as the ultimate in every 
change, is evidently apprehended by him, as proved by 
his eager, lisping demand : " Do it adain ! do it adain ! " 
The lump of white sugar crushed to white sand, or dis- 
solved in his cup of milk, is fully accepted as the same 
sugar, because he unconsciously makes the profoundest 
of all philosophical distinctions — that between the becoming 
and the remaining. Mamma's handkerchief, now here, 
now there, now a handkerchief, then a doll, then a rabbit, 
and again the thin square of handkerchief, gives him no 
trouble, because he instinctively distinguishes between the 

479 



480 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

modal changes and the permanence, and between power 
which can do and the marvellous things which can be done. 

Long before he can put the great facts into words or 
into connected thought, we can recognize his spontane- 
ous complete acceptance of them. Astonished and 
delighted beyond measure at the possible transformations, 
he yet knows that they are transformations ; and that 
power — even that voluntary and intelligent power — is 
requisite to their successive production. 

A later reasoning has assumed, for various reasons, that 
these early preceptions, like the preceptions of forms, 
colors, and sensible motions, are inadequate to explain 
the actual objective data. But the child's perceptions and 
his acceptance of the perceived great truths are not sen- 
sations ; they are his early use of an instinctive insight 
into the nature of things. Heredity has given him the 
brain which enables him to discriminate between the 
transient and the permanent, as it has given him the eye 
which enables him to see the sugar, the handkerchief, 
and their changing forms ; but his own mind, with their 
help brought into correlation with the manifested realities, 
recognizes them as intuitively as it recognizes the food 
offered him when hungry. 

A mind's inferences are trustworthy in the same sense 
in which its perceptions are. In either case, when the 
entire co-operant is in perfect working order, the percep- 
tion and the judgment are correspondingly perfect. But 
the perception of an object through a fog or through 
defective eyes is necessarily imperfect, and the judgments 
made by the help of a brain but weakly correlated may 
be equally inconsequent. In such cases the concurrent 
opinion of the multitude is a safeguard. But insight is 
as reliable as sight. Knowledge is possible and obtain- 
able in a sense strictly parallel with the origination of the 
most primary sensations — by accurate correlation of 
subject and object. 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 48 1 

It is in and by means of the multitudes of changes that 
we all recognize the unchanging, which neither increases 
nor diminishes, but, untouched by all varying modes, 
remains the abiding reality. We know this real to be 
power, to be the power expressed in all changes ; the 
energy which makes the effectiveness of the changes, and 
remains unvaried in quantity when one mode is trans- 
formed into some equivalent mode. By dropping out 
from the attention all of these changes and their relations, 
the power still remains a definite cognition. It was mani- 
fested in the relative. It came into the apprehension 
when the mind was in correlation with relative modes ; 
but once in consciousness and fully cognized as non- 
relative, as independent of the conditions one and all 
under which it became recognizable, henceforth it can 
never be entirely ignored. It may not remain con- 
tinuously in the focus of the directed perceptions ; but 
it must remain somewhere in the dimmer chambers of 
knowledge and within ready recall. 

It is the reliance upon the stability of power, the recog- 
nized unchanging immanent in the changing, which gives 
to every mind its sense of permanence and restfulness in 
the midst of the endless variability of the phenomenal. 
The ever permanent and the never permanent are equally 
obtrusive facts ; and both become generalized, each into 
a unity of its own kind, which remains a reproducible 
thought when objective presentation is withdrawn. The 
mental outlook can include and comprehend both the 
relations and the power brought into conditioned modes 
of activity necessitated by the correlativities with which 
it works. 

The perception is in co-operation with the objects per- 
ceived, and in this way the power informing the mental 
conditions becomes actively co-operative with the power 
which informs the objective conditions. The abiding 
power — forever above, beyond, and independent of all 



482 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

conditions for itself — is yet working under conditions 
arising from the correlation of the terms of the method 
under which it works. These are innately imposed upon 
the method as a whole, by the terms related, as the related 
turning of wheels is mutually imposed. 

The method has become a determinate mechanism, 
and the power works in exact accord with the nature of 
the machine, in every part of the process, on the same 
principle that all power must work in and with all ma- 
chines. The relativity is innate in the method in the 
parallel sense in which it is innate in all machines — that 
is, every part is made inherently dependent upon every 
other part ; it is their working correlatively which consti- 
tutes the unity of the active process carried forward in 
and by that special mechanism. The nature of the pro- 
cess is decided by the correlativities of the machine. 

The individual unit has been likened to the oneness of 
the mathematical figure, made one by its correlated terms. 
So far as the analogy reaches, the parallel is complete. If 
power could be supplied to a triangle which would enable 
it to continuously and successively change its form from 
an equilateral figure to an isosceles, with the unequal side 
of extreme shortness, and back again to the equilateral 
form, it would then fairly represent the rhythmic atom. 
The power would be immanent in the triangle ; it would 
be working under conditions imposed upon the triangle ; 
but in no legitimate sense would the power, as power, be 
correlated into a triangle ; it would remain uncondi- 
tioned power, detailed to manifest special functions in 
accord with a specially conditioned method or working 
mechanism. 

Then if our triangle of variable form could be thrown 
into working correlation with multitudes of other triangles, 
also varying in form, in such ways that they would 
mutually hinder and hold in partial check each other's 
rhythmic changes by becoming mutually entangled and 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 483 

compacted into a dense mass, the immanent force might 
still energize in just the same way and amount as when 
free to carry out all unimpeded rhythmic changes, yet the 
individual triangles would severally become diversely 
modified in form. 

If we further suppose that the force detailed to manifest 
itself in the rhythm of the central triangle of this mass 
was also to be manifested under certain other conditions, 
pertaining not to correlated form but to correlated feel- 
ing, and that the changes in the forms and in the feelings 
being also in correlation must vary together, we should 
then get some approximation to the supposed conditions 
of a dominant mind in co-operation with its organism. 
But our chief point is that it is not the persisting power 
which is correlated, but it is the methods through which 
the power is to become utilized which have been estab- 
lished through an exact correlation of adapted changes. 

Our supposed triangles have become an active complex 
working machine, every part co-operatively adapted to 
every other part. Every familiar machine works upon 
the same plan of correlated changes. Its least elements 
energize from innate correlations ; their modes are modi- 
fied by their associated coworkers. And the mass 
motions as they arise, being the translation of tensions, 
must be impelled by a commensurate amount of free 
motion, as all moving masses invariably are. It is one 
way in which the free motions help to restore the balance 
between themselves and the tensions from which they 
have separated. 

Thus the wheels, and shafts, and pulleys, and bands, 
though in each machine conditioned as to their modes of 
sensible movements by each other, are always actually 
moved by incoming free motions, which, by disturbing 
their equilibrium of sensible rest, compel them to move in 
order to restore the general equipoise. The free motions, 
travelling on with the sensible translations, adapt them- 



484 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

selves while associated to the special modes of their 
carriers ; but unless taken up and transformed to tensions, 
they move on through the machine and are gone. 

The correlations between the working parts of the 
machine are not conditions actually imposed upon the 
free energies which operate the machine, although the 
operations are modified by the static correlations. But 
neither are static forms and changes imposed upon the 
power manifested through their correlations ; the modes 
of the manifestations are one class of existences arising 
because mutually conditioned ; but the power manifested 
is existence unconditioned, absolute. 

Our feelings arise as modes evolved by and with the 
correlations. As the correlated activities narrow or broaden 
their partnerships, our feelings lessen or increase in quality ; 
they have become modes in a complex mechanism so co- 
ordinated that it can do a great variety of differentiated 
work ; and the feeling is the counterpart of the work 
achieved. We can recognize our own feeling as limited 
by, while yet it is originated by, these coworking correla- 
tions. Yet we are compelled to realize that sensibility as 
a type of existence can in no thinkable way originate from 
correlations any more than power can originate from cor- 
relations. The correlations only originate the mode of 
the sensibility as they originate the modes in which power 
is manifested. 

The sensibility is power. Our modes of sensibility are 
modes of power ; they are limited to us individually be- 
cause the correlations individualize us and all of our modi- 
fications, material and mental. Our changing modes of 
every kind thus pertain exclusively to ourselves ; but we 
also recognize the non-relative as the actual power imma- 
nent both in the psychical and the physical changes alike 
of ourselves and others. 

Or if we regard ourselves as co-operating in and with 
the organism as a complex machine, able by the help of 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 485 

the free energies to extend its processes to almost infinite 
distances, yet the power which everywhere adjusts itself 
to these co-operative modes remains indestructible while 
the modes are continually produced and continually de- 
stroyed. We identify ourselves both with the permanence 
and with the changes. The power not only remains, but 
it remains with us j it is the abidingness which each one of 
us can use and control in his own behalf — the power de- 
tailed to special service in behalf of the conditioned being, 
individualized because of his innate limitations. We are 
the small patterns marked off upon the large paper ; but 
within those boundaries the individuality may claim not 
only the form but the substance. 

Our correlations are innate ; we are self-limited, but 
only as every other machine is limited by its own de- 
pendency of parts. The machine was constructed upon a 
plan which involved these dependent parts. In other 
words, the machine is the product of intelligent forecast 
and accomplishment. So is the individual! So is the 
organism and the extra-organic world by which the indi- 
vidual may enlarge the boundaries, not of his individuality, 
but of his co-operations. And his co-operations enable 
him so to control all true co-operants that they become 
the practical prolongations of his own energy. In this 
way, his available power is increased by as much added 
energy as he is enabled to adapt and adopt as a prolonga- 
tion of his more immediate activity. 

A mechanism so constructed and enabled to enlarge its 
operations by directing and utilizing co-ordinated power, 
making it an efficient part of its own most intimate pro- 
cesses, is a mechanism which could have been originated 
by nothing except intelligent and rational purpose ! We 
emphasize the statement : every machine, though a purely 
physical structure, has been constructed, put together in 
material correlations which adapt it to a special end, only 
by the supervision of intelligence. The ultimate atom 



486 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

is a machine adapted to sentient ends ; the ultimate 
atom has been constructed, constituted, by Intelligent 
Supervision. But the atom does its own work like the 
machine. 

The work which every machine is adapted to perform, 
is work which has been planned and provided for by some 
intelligence. The man-made machine is rationally co- 
ordinated, not only in its structure, but in its subsequent 
operations, which are always co-operations. Every indi- 
vidual atom is a persistent ultimate machine which has 
been rationally co-ordinated, not only in its structure, but 
in its subsequent operations, which are always co-opera- 
tions. The work which it does it was expected to do. 

The earlier ideas of construction were more inadequate 
than those of the present time. The distinction between 
directing the physical forces of Nature in such ways as to 
enable them to do the work which one wishes to have ac- 
complished, and literally doing the work oneself, as the 
woodman seemed to do when he chopped the fallen tree 
into the desired lengths, was not, and indeed is not, yet 
currently realized. The man himself does the work in no 
other sense when his own arm wields the axe, than when 
he employs the arm of another to do it for him, or than 
he would if he employed a machine with iron muscles and 
the equivalent of the axe to do the same work. The pro- 
cess is material from first to last, though more roundabout 
in the one case than in the other. The mind's work in 
the different cases is the same in kind ; it consists wholly 
in so reco-ordinating physical forces that their co-opera- 
tions eventuate in the accomplishment of his purposes. 

That another mind, when another man's arm is em- 
ployed, coworks to the same end with his own, neither 
changes the fact that mental work when applied to the 
effecting of any changes in physics, molar or molecular, is 
distinctively directive or co-ordinative in kind ; or that 
physical work is continuous in process, and employs its 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 487 

own forces exclusively in all material combinations, and 
in all physical outcome, visible and invisible. 

The limited intelligence, working through the organiza- 
tion with eye and arm and hand, which are relatively but 
clumsy masses of material, and working with other already 
formed masses in building his machine, contents himself 
also with co-ordinations in the mass. He correlates end- 
less bands to the opposite revolutions of cog-wheels, which 
in their turn cause the revolving of spindles or any other 
similar adjusted devices ; but his readjustments of mate- 
rials are the readjustments of masses ; and the work done 
is done by sensible tensions, and it is done upon other 
sensible tensions; and yet, the correlations in this way 
mentally foreseen, provided for, and secured, and so 
carried forward into active exercise, are the same in kind 
with molecular correlations. 

The chemist, by bringing together the adapted ele- 
ments and providing all other suitable conditions for the 
production of the compound which he desires to obtain, 
is providing the right interatomic correlations which will 
result in the doing of that kind of co-operative work. 
The co-operation is physical ; but the correlations are first 
recognized as possibilities and as desirable, and then they 
are brought about by physical means which the mind 
controls and directs through other physical means. It 
can do this, as the theory assumes, by first controlling and 
directing its own soma ; through that, the already adapted 
nerves and muscles of the organism ; and through these 
the also co-ordinated extra-organic forces. 

In other words, the limited mind works in part through 
correlations which are already established and in active 
co-operation, and in part it produces new correlations at 
its own discretion. It does this by bringing together 
such groups of already established correlations as ex- 
perience indicates or has proved to be available for the 
furtherance of the desired ends. 



488 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

Then, since it is fully conceded that the man's machine 
is created and operated under the direction of intelli- 
gence, can we be required to admit that the diverse 
masses utilized in constructing the machine, and the free 
energies utilized in operating it have been correlated 
without the influential co-operation of intelligent forecast 
and purpose ? Purpose includes intelligence ; the direct- 
ing of means towards the accomplishment of that purpose 
requires knowledge and efficiency. A child may take 
food when hungry, because food and organism are both 
supplied, ready to co-operatively minister to his desire ; 
but is it credible that no Intelligence remotely provided 
for the infinity of co-ordinations which may be made to 
adapt the demand to the supply ? 

It is legitimate to infer that no processes adapted to the 
furtherance of specific ends were ever brought into working 
efficiency without the directive influence of specific intelli- 
gence ! It is equally legitimate to infer that no correlated 
processes adapted either directly or indirectly to the further- 
ance of desirable sentient ends, special or general, have 
become so adapted without the intervention of Rational 
Cause, of Intelligent Design and Intention. 

The makers of ordinary machines provide both the 
correlated structures, of tensions or static energy, and the 
dynamic or free energies which operate the movable 
tensions ; together they thus produce a limited, desired 
and designed work. The Maker of the ultimate atoms 
also provides the correlated structure of tensions and the 
free motions by which they are operated ; together they 
produce a limited and, we must assume, a desired and 
designed work. But He also originated and established 
the plan in accordance with which the free forces and the 
tensions were brought into exercise through correlations 
which enable them to do the desired work. 

He also originated and established the potential limited 
minds in correlation with the motive co-operations, and 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 489 

He provided not only for the evolution of experience, 
but for the employment of this experience in originating 
secondary machines and in directing their operations. 
This is an infinitely larger scheme ; its execution is im- 
measurably more complicated and indirect ; and because 
many intelligences of a limited comprehension are em- 
ployed in carrying it out, and are thrown largely upon 
their own discretion as to details which may be infinitely 
Varied within certain definite limits, the possible outcome 
at any given stage of the all-comprehensive process may 
be extremely variable. The limits of variation are 
definitely fixed. 

But can the extent and grandeur of the correlated whole 
be supposed to detract from its rationality ? If one small 
section of it requires intelligence in the direction of the 
process, can we deny Intelligence in the origination and 
direction of the total mechanism and its processes ? The 
Brooklyn Bridge is a great constructive work. Many 
minds were occupied in its origination and completion ; 
yet the final outcome was a happy co-ordination of all 
parts in one impressive whole. The number of the 
workers in no way diminished the necessity for a prede- 
termined careful plan. 

The limited freedom accorded to some of the more 
responsible workers in no wise disturbed the grand unity 
of the design. Small variations in minor matters, more 
or less ornamentation, even the number and size of the 
inferior parts of the structure, equivalent in their amounts 
of strength and sustenance given to the general mechan- 
ism, could afford to settle themselves, with some leeway 
left to individual choice. 

The Maker of the Universe has allowed an ample lee- 
way to his intelligent workmen ; yet the vast design is 
becoming more and more apparent in its co-ordinated 
unity. The inorganic world works as mechanically as a 
steam-engine, and is as likely to run off the track as the 



490 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

engine would be left to itself ! But there are the hosts of 
busy, growing intellects, stimulated by imperative needs, 
which more and more clearly begin to recognize how 
desirable it is to take things in charge. Also they are 
rapidly learning the feasibility of doing so ; they increas- 
ingly recognize the amenableness not only of the tensions 
but equally of the more mercurial energies. What 
wonders await the twentieth century ! 

Mankind in their processes create new modes to any 
extent ; but they create no new materials. This must be 
equally true of the Infinite Causality. The worlds were 
not correlated from nothings, but from the persistent 
totality of all things. Men build their machines by 
adding part to part till the separate pieces are all 
formed into a co-ordinated whole. The materials are 
largely ready-made, furnished in subordinate working cor- 
relation, and their rational task is only that of correlating 
existing correlations ; of adding brick to brick, cemented 
by adapted mortar. This is creation by addition and is 
little more than simple aggregation put together for a 
purpose. 

But creating a Relative from the Absolute is creation 
by limitation. By a practical subtraction or contraction 
of absolute uses of Power, and restricting its exercise to 
new established correlations, a Universe like the existing 
one doubtless might be originated. 

Fashioning a garment from a web of cloth or chiselling 
a statue from a block of marble are two species of creation 
by limitation ; but in these examples the surplus material 
is visibly removed ; the tensions are taken away in slices 
until the desired form remains in the statue ; and the 
garment, first cut into the shape desired, is refitted and 
recombined. It is only another mode of readjustment of 
the ready-made static material. Even the physicist with 
his intangible building blocks can only put them together 
or take them apart, with unlimited possible variations in 



THE ONE AND THE MANY, 49 1 

the grouping of his more dynamic ready-made blocks 
which will enable them to associate with new intimacies 
or to reject old ones. 

But the constitution of the ultimate units, the sentient 
relative beings, can be only a working separateness, a 
separation by process ; as the ripples upon a surface of 
water are visibly separated from the whole underlying 
mass by the motion which differentiates them. Our atoms 
are separated in this way from the totality of absolute 
and relative existence by the correlated motions which 
constitute them limited individualities. Henceforth, as 
so conditioned, they are distinct motion systems, as a 
ripple of water is a distinct moving form. But while the 
ripple must distribute its dynamic motion and fall back 
into the general mass, the rhythmic atom, constituted a 
perfect equilibrium of motion, innately co-operative and 
conservative, and able to maintain itself in distinct integ- 
rity, however co-operative with other motion systems, 
must remain distinct forever unless the Intelligence which 
originated it should now annihilate it. The feeling is the 
outgrowth of these motor co-operations. 

But as the Creative Intelligence has resigned the abso- 
lute uses of power in behalf of these limited individual 
uses, and as we find abundant reasons for believing this 
to be a free gift of pure benevolence and productive of 
incalculable sentient gain to the created individuals, what 
reason can there be for destroying what has been so 
wonderfully and elaborately originated? The present 
order of things has continued for countless ages already, 
and here on the earth men are but beginning to compre- 
hend and to profit by most of the higher classes of mental 
values. Also it is highly probable that as we rejoice in 
the enjoyment of others, Infinite enjoyment if not in- 
creased is yet not diminished by witnessing the increasing 
knowledge and the sweeter unselfishness destined to be 
more and more unfolded in finite sensibilities. We can 



492 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

realize little of the nature of the eternal blessedness, 
enduring with Duration. This in no wise argues its non- 
existence. The mud-turtle can have little appreciations 
of our happiness and nothing of those kind which spring 
from the divinest sources. The Divine Totality is not 
limited to our limitations ; but it is not, cannot be, an 
insensate Existence, since our sensibilities are derived 
from it. 

A physical constitution established through internal 
dependent limitations is the Relative discriminated, but 
in no other way divided, from the Absolute. It must 
move in and of and for itself, in accordance with its 
individual conditions ; but the immanent power so limited 
in its manifestations is still Absolute Power individualized 
only as to its modes of use. 

As the sum of these associated modes constitutes the 
individual, all feeling which arises within these conditions 
must be the individual feeling, as all motion within the 
system is individual motion. Its personality beginning 
wholly without experience, it must be progressively ac- 
quired. The conditioned motion, though also starting 
from zero as conditioned motion, began in quantity 
exactly what it must continue in quantity, so that on the 
physical side there can be no accumulation of power ; its 
increased efficiency must arise through the physical co- 
operation which enables the mind to profit by the entire 
co-operative process. 

To argue that such different series of adjustments, as 
complex as these become in process of time, and as admi- 
rable in their psychical outcome as we already know them 
to be from our own experience, have no beneficent, rational 
intention back of them, effective as rational Cause of 
their existence, can only indicate a confused and tremen- 
dous inconsequence. We may neglect the sub-conscious 
sensibility altogether, yet the surplus of enjoyment over 
the suffering up to the present time would still be 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 493 

immense ; but the great argument lies in the hope for the 
future to our successors in this life, and to all of us in the 
coming eternities ! 

But our inferences in this connection must be drawn 
from the objective phenomena rather than from the mental 
gain or loss. Mind is one of the great facts of the uni- 
verse ; if minds have originated as limitations self-imposed 
upon absolute Mind, the evolution of personal experience 
might arise very much as we have supposed. The theory 
would fairly explain the admitted phenomena, whether 
considered good or bad. Self-imposed in this connection 
is a convenient expression and does equally well with 
voluntarily imposed, yet neither, in the sense in which we 
generally use those terms, can apply to the Infinite. The 
self of each of us is a conditioned personality, and volition 
is one of its modes. The totality of Being can have no 
such narrow created selfhood and no limited volition. 

But while we recognize the limitation of our own estate, 
since limitations do not create power, but only decide the 
nature of its manifestations •, it is possible to look through 
the limitations to the Unlimited ; and we can realize that 
in some real and effective sense, wholly unfettered Benig- 
nity has conditioned us to a heritage freely bestowed. We 
can think the possible conditions through which we may 
have become individualized. 

The rhythmic mind-motion unity is an attempt at the 
expression of such conditions. Oppositely directing and 
correlating energies in space and time, with provisions 
made for a dependent, a growing experience arising in 
time and consciousness, would be a sufficient endowment 
for a persisting unit of relative being. And by correlating 
the possible co-operations of the many individuals in such 
ways as to enable any mind which becomes sufficiently 
intelligent to control and direct an unlimited amount of 
physical power, or to acquire equally unlimited amounts 
of knowledge and other sentient experiences, is a suffi- 



494 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, 

cient endowment of energy and of the possible practical 
methods for its co-ordinated exercise to provide for all 
evolution in the world of mind. The working correlations 
between tensions and free motions are equivalent in struc- 
ture and process to the ordinary machine, to the energy 
by which it is co-operated, and also to the work which it 
performs. Thus the creative plan includes all mechanisms 
and the evolution of the intelligence competent to reco- 
ordinate the simpler machines into those more complex, 
as well as to so readjust the energies by which they can be 
operated as progressively to re-create the world to higher 
uses. 

Provided we can grant all of these propositions — and 
how can they be controverted ? — Archbishop Paley's argu- 
ment from design is re-established upon a broader basis. 
He reasoned with the light of his own times. 

Nature's inorganic machines operate themselves only in 
the parallel sense in which all machines are self-operating, 
provided the free motor power is adequately supplied. In 
the isolated atoms, if such exist, the free motions and the 
tensions are co-operative perpetually within the system 
itself ; in this way its normal motions, whatever modes they 
may have, are maintained in self-operation. When through 
interatomic co-operation tensions are formed and free 
motions distributed, the atomic mechanism and its pro- 
cesses are alike modified, but it still remains self-operating 
as an atomic rhythm. 

When a machinist has constructed a machine composed 
of tensions, but in which certain parts are so designed 
that they can, with help, take on molar motions, the 
masses are still internally self-operative — that is, the atoms 
and molecules are in co-operative insensible vibrations, in 
which the free motions and the tensions co-operate in 
rigid conformity to their present structural conditions. 
But when molar or translatory motion is to be produced 
in the parts adapted for this secondary kind of movement, 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 495 

the machinist is forced to resort to the method of re- 
relating motor energies of some kind in such ways as to 
produce the desired translatory movements. 

In all cases of translation, plain or rotary, a previously 
foreign energy must, directly or indirectly, become the 
active force ; must in effect become compounded with 
the molar movement at the moment of its inception. 
This is a virtual re-uniting of separated tensions and free 
motions — not in each atom, but in the mass as a total, 
because of the interatomic locking of tensions. The result 
is mass motion instead of mass dissociation. 

A translatory movement of that kind is never said to 
be self-moved, because we fully recognize that the move- 
ment was produced by a sensible cause. But it is not as 
easy to realize that one half of the translatory motion was 
caused in the moving mass itself by its backward push 
against the initiating force. The co-operating principle is 
identical with the one which enables a man to walk if he 
has something stable to walk upon ; though in walking 
the man initiates the motion, and the earth pushes back — 
that is, the man thrusts himself forward as the boatman 
pushes the boat out from shore by means of his oar thrust 
against the land, while the translated mass is thrust 
against by the initiating force. But the opposed co-opera- 
tive forces are exactly equal in both cases ; and a wheel 
made to revolve by a fall of water, or an engine moved by 
steam, are physically exactly as much self-moved as the 
man is in walking or jumping. 

The self-achieved movements of all kinds are rigorously 
but one half due to oneself and one half to the co-operant, 
whatever that may be, and whether organic or inorganic. 
A reader not thoroughly acquainted with mechanics may 
perhaps realize the action of this working correlation 
better at this stage of the discussion than at the begin- 
ning. This correlated principle is the basis of the rhythmic 
atom and of all possible physical copartnerships. One 



496 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

can do absolutely nothing by himself alone. Also, he can 
do absolutely nothing for himself alone. Feeling is 
equally dependent upon co-operation. 

But this universal association in process was introduced 
here in order to make clear the distinction between volun- 
tary or directed motion and pure mechanical or undirected 
motion, and to be able to emphasize the modified inter- 
pretation of the much debated " law of necessity." 

Nature has no laws which are not grounded in the con- 
stitution of the correlated universe — hence, constitutionally 
grounded in the ultimate atoms. Men promulgate enact- 
ments. Nature never does ; yet the laws of Nature are 
sometimes regarded in the light of simple enactments 
which can be either obeyed or disobeyed, and variously 
evaded. Nature's laws can never be disobeyed, never 
evaded, never broken. To break any law of Nature, 
physical or psychical, would be to deconstitute the con- 
stitution of things — an obvious impossibility. All that 
we can do is to make a good or a bad use of our oppor- 
tunities ; but both possibilities are equally in accord with 
Nature's laws. 

What then is the law of physical necessity ? It is the 
law of physical correlation ; that one constitutional 
decree covers and includes all physical laws of every pos- 
sible character. It means that at no time, in no place, 
and by no method, can any physical process or event arise 
which is not produced in rigid accord with this double- 
sided law of physical necessity. This is equally true of 
mind. 

It means that, so long as physical nature is undirected, 
as it is in all processes in which mind has not yet become 
a guiding force, it must do precisely what it does do, 
it has no choice in the matter ; it acts and re-acts mechani- 
cally like any other machine. Every detail of every 
outcome is exactly what it has to be. But it does not 
mean that every detail of every outcome has to be exactly 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 497 

what it is, or that it had to be exactly what it became 
when mind directively intervenes. 

On the contrary, it might have been different in ten 
thousand ways and yet have obeyed the same changeless 
law of correlated necessity ! This assertion follows, of 
course, if every atom is permanently correlated in its own 
right, and only temporarily correlated in all of its inter- 
atomic copartnerships — provided there is some one to 
elect for it the kind, the nature, and the extent of its 
more immediate copartnerships. Since its action 
must be determined by that of its co-operant, and 
equally the reverse, there is no innate necessity that 
any physical event should be what it is. The neces- 
sity was that so long as all of the secondary conditions 
were what they were, it should then act precisely as 
it did act, because it must forever work in mathe- 
matical co-ordination with its working correlatives. Its 
province is neither knowing, nor caring, nor choosing ; it 
is simply doing ; and its doing lies just at hand, for it 
works exclusively in an endless present. The necessity is 
co-operative — hence, modifiable by changing the co- 
operant. 

So long as each of us can leave a stone in the middle of 
a path for months, where every passer is liable to stumble 
over it, or can move it aside the first time we meet with 
it, without breaking any physical law in either case, it is 
useless to argue that what we call a miracle might not be 
produced without breaking any of the laws of Nature. 
But when we argue from the uniformity of process that 
the relative universe of mind and matter has been created 
and is intended to co-operatively work out its own salva- 
tion in the best way it can, by discovering and applying 
the best methods of doing so, this puts an entirely new 
face upon the question of Supreme interference. 

Each finite mind which has become a rational and 

intellectual power can control and direct as much 
3» 



498 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

physical power as it can redirect into new methods of 
co-operation. Like Archimedes, it can move the world if 
it can find a fulcrum for its lever and a co-operating power 
to work the lever. It can do nothing except by correlating 
the physical forces in such ways as to enable them to 
execute its purposes. But whenever it learns both why 
and how it is permitted to attempt all things, by its faith 
carried over into the redistribution of the working forces, 
static and dynamic, it can remove mountains and cast all 
hindrances into the sea. The sword of the intellect can 
cut down the greatest difficulties more easily than the 
mower levels the grass of the field — if the mower uses his 
own muscles to do the work. The extra-organic forces, 
ready to do his more indirect bidding, will be less taxing 
because less closely related to his own personal energizing. 

But before one can control and redirect all physical 
potencies, he must adequately recognize them, their 
nature, and their functions. He can do this only by 
sitting at the seat of customs and exchanging tribute with 
all things — not as a mendicant or as a mere tax-gatherer, 
but as a lawful trader, exchanging value for value. If the 
worlds, physical, mental, and moral, work for his advantage, 
he must return measure for measure. 

The law of necessity is the law of working correlation. 
Primarily this law is intra-atomic. Secondarily it is inter- 
atomic. Relative Being is constituted by no other neces- 
sity, and this necessity is not rigid, is not static ; it is 
endlessly dynamic. 

Has progress been made in the organic domain by the 
ceaseless struggle for existence? Assuredly. But the 
struggle has been directed by feeling and carried on by 
muscle. Without an everywhere growing sensibility, there 
could have been no warfare. The stones only cry out 
when they respond to the protesting sensibilities which 
are not stones. Sensibility is evolved through struggle, 
through the fierce passions which lead to conflict ; even 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 499 

through the sufferings of wounds and defeat, as well as 
through the triumphs of victory. On that low plane where 
self-centred emotions are more powerful and attractive 
than the broader social and more rational enjoyments, it 
may or may not be the most economic possibility. It is 
a stage in the progress of mere brute development from 
which men are not yet wholly freed, but from which 
every educator may become a Joshua in leading the peo- 
ple over into a more desirable promised land. 

True, every living thing must eat or be eaten. A fitting 
supply of nutriment is an indispensable condition of 
organic existence ; but among the unreasoning animals it 
is generally the more powerful and better organized who 
prey upon the less favored. Then if we remember that 
these lower tissues are but reorganized into the higher ; 
that the waste-products of the higher organisms during 
life, and the remains when co-operative life has departed, 
feed again the lower animal or the vegetable world, we 
may recognize that no real harm can presumably be done 
to any, and that opportunities are repeated to all, possibly 
for taking the central dynamic position in a new organism 
of the type of its devouring host, whose legitimate off- 
spring it would thus become. 

Thus on the whole the organic trend is upward in 
theory, as we know that it is in fact. The endless cycle 
is not that of a circle, but of a spiral. But let us fully 
realize that this spiral is physical, not mental. It is an 
organic climbing in response to sentient impulse. Whether 
or not a human mind must or can develop first in the 
organism — let us say of a mollusk — and so move on up- 
wards by successive stages to man, there seem to be no 
present data for positively determining. 

The transmigration of the living sensibility was and is 
a favorite theory with Eastern philosophers, who in this 
way distribute both rewards and punishments. They 
level both up and down, having no theory of an ultimate 



500 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

evolutionary outcome. Most moderns who adopt the 
theory of re-incarnations, though they may retain traces 
of the retribution economy, are disposed to accept the 
modern belief and expectation of a final mental gain 
through a disciplinary purification and its enforced 
wisdom. 

But with a mind-matter constitution established in and 
with the individuality, beginning whenever the correlative 
activity began, there is certainly no need for a succession 
of incarnations. There is need for a higher organism 
through which, by action and reaction, it can gain the 
higher human development. Given the favored organic 
position and conditions, and the adapted sentient-motor 
unit, profiting by its advantages, what reason can be given 
why the prospective mind may not have come freshly 
from the sun, the moon, the North star, or anywhere else, 
to take up from the beginning the privilege of an active 
mental evolution? All ultimate individualities may be 
identical in kind, but no obvious necessity decides that they 
must be, and in an order of things where other varieties 
are prevalent, the weight of evidence for the present is 
on the side of varieties, even in the ultimate units. 

Neither does it seem consonant with Nature's known 
type of retributions which inhere in the nature of the 
conduct itself — the wise and good act bringing its better 
results and the weak or bad act its related consequences, 
now and here, though not always, recognized — to visit 
punishments in some later incarnation for crimes and 
shortcomings not remembered and so having no present 
moral value, and belonging to a stage of life to all intents 
as foreign to the present consciousness as though it had 
never existed. Rewards so bestowed would lose their 
chief value. No later memory could obviate these weighty 
disadvantages. 

Nor is it apparently needful to have had the sentient 
development successively gained by a mollusk, a mouse, 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 501 

and a monkey before taking part in that which pertains 
properly to a human being. There are reasons why 
organisms must arise progressively by small variations 
from prior organisms. They are all organically evolved 
in detail by nascent sensibilities, with no directive power 
beyond that of present nascent impulse, co-operating with 
physical and hereditary conditions, and later with the 
mental direction of the dominant mind. Thus a secured 
vantage-ground to start from, with this complexity of 
physical coworkers, more or less non-adapted for the 
best results, must be of the highest importance. 

But that kind of physical or organic evolution is effected 
by the co-operative many. The dominant mind does its 
own work, only a limited part in this type of slow advance- 
ment, which, though sentiently directed yet is not intelli- 
gently, is often far from rationally directed. We may 
safely leave the consideration of successive earthly lives 
as an open question until more data have accumulated. 
But it would certainly be pleasanter to have the more 
simple cumulative experience of one human being than to 
have been carried through possibly scores of inferior 
cycles of consciousness — each disconnected from all of the 
others apparently in a sense even more abortive than that 
which arises in some few unfortunate persons because of 
a diseased organism. 

Doubtless in some remoter future, conditions might 
arise in which memory would be able to recall these 
several stages of one inclusive sensibility. One must 
suppose that such recollections would be rather distasteful ; 
and for one I can hardly appreciate the mental wholesome- 
ness to be derived from a repeated lesson of that kind. 
As a moral lesson it would be a failure, as we have indi- 
cated, because, as every mind can work only in connection 
with its adapted and chosen co-operant, the good and the 
evil consequences are rigidly dependent upon the kinds of 
work done. Thus a somewhat later recognition of one's 



502 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

foolishness, or wickedness at a certain time, and the woful 
consequent dwarfing of future opportunities, may be a 
most wholesome lesson for a future similar in its con- 
ditions to the past. 

But what moral warning or stimulus can there be in 
knowing what one did amiss when he was an ape or a 
mud-turtle ? What helpful inferences can the intellect 
make from being told, when sick, or at a physical 
disadvantage in any way, that this is because he was 
Captain Kidd or a savage Indian in some former life ? 
Punishments of that kind do not assort well with any 
theory of evolution. 

If we are right in the conclusion that no nascent mind 
gains any development beyond that of a present more 
sensation, in any organism with which it may be asso- 
ciated, unless it can take the one dynamic position and 
opportunity which that organism has to offer, there can 
be neither physical, nor moral, nor intellectual need for 
the transmigration of conscious minds. The nascent 
minds are useful and in their degree they are gainers 
whenever they are workers and sharers in the gains from 
organization. Without them no satisfactory explanation 
of organic evolution has yet been given. We think none 
can be given without calling in their co-operative aid. 

But while automatic organic process must be marked 
off from inorganic process, and marked off also from the 
automatic action of a machine because there the sensi- 
bility is not within but without the machine, so far as it 
is a directive force, yet organization and all of its auto- 
matic functions are far more closely allied to physical 
than to psychical phenomena. 

Like the formation of worlds, with available surfaces, 
and atmospheres, and temperatures, for the occupation of 
intelligent beings who can profit by such advantages, 
organic evolution is far more a means adapted to the 
evolution of the dominant minds of their respective 






THE ONE AND THE MANY. 503 

organisms, than as a mode of developing the sensibility of 
the organic constituents. That also may be taken into 
the account as a value of its own kind ; but that these 
nascent sensibilities are destined ever to become more 
than varied and pleasant sensation is questionable. Be 
that as it may, a human infant's mind, placed in its advan- 
tageous position, in working correlation with the advanced 
organic processes by which it is surrounded, might assur- 
edly gain its entire mental development in sole connection 
with its own human environment. 

Is it asked, where then do the subconscious and dimly 
conscious animal individualities go when separated from 
their organisms? Possibly where we go. Neither ex- 
perience nor other knowledge can give a definite answer. 
We only know that there is a co-operative field and a 
method continuously adapted both for them and for us 
somewhere in the correlated universe. They and we do 
no more than carry out the details each of our own 
special work — they impelled largely by instinct, we im- 
pelled both by instinct and intelligence. Desires, voli- 
tions, experiences more of enjoyment than suffering, we 
all inherit — the difference being only one of degree ; 
and as subjective individualities we all co-operate as 
we can and to whatever extent we can with an objective 
universe. 

Natural Selection can preserve the strongest physical 
strains as the physically fittest, in preference to the 
weaker ones ; it can preserve the small animals that are 
best protected by unwittingly resembling surrounding 
plants or other animals better defended than themselves, 
and Selection can accumulate traits such as these with no 
conscious intervention of mind as directive force. But 
Selection could not evolve more and more perfect eyes if 
there were not a seeing mind making active use of these 
implements which are specially growing in adaptation to 
the increasing sense of vision. 



504 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

A distinction must be made between characters which 
are unconsciously acquired, chiefly through merely physi- 
cal and chemical methods, and characters which differen- 
tiate and strengthen only in response to sentient needs 
and demands. Without a mind to hear, no ears would 
ever have been evolved. With no gain from breathing, 
gills and lungs would not have originated. The conscious 
mind builds about itself the organs and structures 
responsive to its impelling desires, and the nascent 
mind does the same, because mind and matter are consti- 
tutionally in working correlation. 

Behind all process is the Infinite Mind which originated 
all process indirectly, because He originated the ultimate 
units of being, endowing them with power to co-operate 
in accordance with their own persisting constitutions. 
The present Universe is the legitimate outcome. The 
future Universe will be the infinitely grander and better 
outcome. But without the individual sensibilities, nascent 
and conscious, each to accomplish that part of the work 
adapted to itself, the vast mechanism would halt ; and it 
often does halt, as a great system of banded machinery is 
checked when a single cog in a wheel slips or is broken. 

Each one of us in our present conditions has a definite 
command of power. But the limitations through which 
we and all things are constituted, do not, cannot originate 
power. The power is behind and beyond and indepen- 
dent of all limitations ; is the Omnipotence in which all 
mutually dependent limitations inhere — literally inhere. 

Our cognizance of Power, though derived through lim- 
ited manifestations, can put aside all mere relativities and 
recognize the efricient principle of the Universe as One 
with the Efricient Principle of Absolute Being. If we 
have any knowledge whatever, it is a knowledge of Power 
— a realization of it as energy, pure and simple and Ab- 
solute. We can by no means stretch our minds into 
covering the whole of Infinity ; but we can drop the finite 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 505 

out of consciousness, and look directly into the unveiled 
Infinite. 

Our consciousness is as truly a part of the Unlimited, 
as of the limited. Its cognitions of the Relative are rela- 
tively acquired ; but the comprehensive knowledge of all 
the terms of a relation is not itself necessarily relative. 
Everything which is known can be known both as the 
relative and as Non-relative. It is both, and it can be so 
comprehended. 

Our sensibility is exercised and developed under cor- 
related conditions. But it was not the correlations which 
originated essential Sensibility. They only enabled us to 
bring it into exercise as a growing acquisition, which we 
ourselves are each permitted to make our individual pos- 
session. 

In learning to know ourselves as mind and as matter, 
we know ourselves and all finite things both in their 
differentiated correlations and in their undifferentiated 
absoluteness. We know all things as of Existence which 
persists through all duration, and in this aspect of an 
eternal being as independent of time and space and all 
relativities, even that of individuality itself. We are 
individual only as personality is evolved in us through 
our conditions. As of the Absolute, we are impersonal, 
undifferentiated. 

Yet we not only may recognize, but, placed in the 
right attitude for perceiving, we must recognize as dis- 
tinctly the absoluteness of our eternal substance as we do 
the endless relativity of our exclusively personal ex- 
periences. We are blind when we try to reach out 
beyond the great fact of eternal Existence with its In- 
finite attributes, its Omnipotence, its Omniscience, its 
Omnipresence. But that this abiding Totality of Being 
does exist, we are as undoubtingly assured as we are that 
the evolved world of changing forms and experiences also 
exists in its kind. 



506 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

The correlated Universe is but the fringe upon the 
Non-correlated, — the grass and flowers budding and 
blossoming from the surface ; but without the Absolute 
and Infinite there could be no finite and correlated indi- 
vidualities. It is our own personal being through its ex- 
periences which is inestimable in personal values. To 
these we look for all of the advantages of an increasing 
and immortal self-consciousness, in communion with our 
own kind by the interchange of thoughts, emotions, and all 
ever broadening experiences, which can only become most 
appreciated when they are shared with others. 

The social life of the future as of the present must 
remain the great charm of the future as of the present — 
if all of our highest enjoyments are to become more and 
more perfect ; and in the nature of things they must so 
become. The tendency of feeling in all of the most 
desirable directions is towards enlargement and a more 
discriminated refinement. The mind learns both to 
extend its voluntary copartnerships, and to be more 
wisely selective, as guided by its past experiences. 

Emotions have generally been far more self-centred, if 
not selfish, chaotic, and undiscriminative, than any form 
of thinking or even of sensation. They have been much 
more personally related to us, and more persistently, 
often foolishly, cherished by us, as well as more often 
derived from all kinds of hap-hazard influences, and less 
under the guidance of reason and volition, than any other 
kinds of experience. Thus the same fact, communicated 
at the same time and in the same way to two persons, 
may throw one of them into the profoundest rage, or 
grief, or joy, while the other remains comparatively indif- 
ferent. They sustain different personal relations to the 
event. Something of these very unlike results may 
always obtain, since no two individuals can sustain identi- 
cal relations to the same objective facts. But it is 
because the emotional exercise of the sensibilities has 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 507 

been much less brought under wholesome educational 
influences, and has not been as generously extended into 
the social world as the more reflective processes have, that 
the feelings of the one person in the above illustration 
may become too excessive, and those of the other too 
apathetic. All such defects but await their remedies. 

The fear sometimes expressed, that the emotional 
nature may be evolved into a kind of dead-level dormancy, 
must be unfounded. On the contrary, the future should 
develop a deeper, intenser, wider sympathy, which can 
feel and enjoy keenly both for itself and for others ! The 
sweetest of all emotions is certainly that of sympathy 
mutually shared, of sympathy at once given and received. 
Common interests and the knowledge that such interests 
are shared in common, in the mental as in the physical 
world, when allied motions coincide, is the one method 
of psychical, as it is the one method of physi- 
cal reinforcement. Assuredly the highest joys of a 
future life, as of the present one, must arise from the 
social reinforcement of every experience. As knowledge 
becomes clarified, more definitely distinct to us in its rela- 
tions, and more highly appreciated by oneself, when 
communicated and appreciated by others, so does every 
other form of sensibility. 

Even the selfishness, the crimes, and the cruelties of 
mankind, like the irrational warfare of the brute world, 
have all arisen as perversions of Nature's one method of 
evolving mind with its entire variety of exquisite enjoy- 
ments. In the nature of the case, with a method which 
must be delicately balanced to a hair's-breadth to work 
in perpetual equilibrium, the enjoyment may be readily 
turned to sufferings. But the sufferings become the 
finger-posts to point the way out from mistakes of all 
kinds ! They are Nature's unfailing retributions, — positive 
when giving the felt pain, negative when withholding the 
larger possible good. 



508 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

These negative retributions are not well understood, 
especially by those who themselves are most suffering 
because of them. The imperative educational work lies 
along the line of teaching these feebler folk the nature and 
the causes of their feebleness, and in helping them to apply 
the only possible remedies in accord with all co-operative 
processes which must involve either gain or loss. 

The nascent mind can only act as the nascent desire 
impels it to act. This desire, because it meets its im- 
mediate gratification when moving in a directed harmony 
with its coworkers, co-operates upon that principle. 
Hence organization and the so-called organic life. But 
a sustained organism necessitates the inflow of available 
dynamic energy, hence of a higher controlling sensibility. 
The nascent minds have no intelligence which can enable 
them to utilize the free energies ; they can only avail 
themselves of the foods close at hand or brought to them 
by the fluid currents of water or air. The very lowest 
organisms have only the mineral world to furnish them 
with a food supply. 

But minerals are not sufficiently highly organized to 
meet all of the needs of the more complex organisms. 
As the organizing power becomes a little more differen- 
tiated, its needs are better served if it appropriates its 
organic predecessors and contemporaries. They suffer 
no harm, but organic differentiation is carried, through 
their slightly more complex co-operations, an infinitesimal 
step onward and upward. The same process in kind goes 
onward instinctively and indefinitely, evolving higher and 
higher organic species until the human organism with its 
wonderful complexity and its unlimited utilities has been 
finally attained, with an evolved mind to profit by it. 

But the organizing principle has not been changed from 
first to last ; it has remained an unintelligent desire for 
co-operation, for assimilating food, for finding an adapted 
immediate co-operant. Even the human sensibility has, 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 509 

in this respect, gone but a very little way beyond this 
primitive hunger and the content derived from its gratifi- 
cation. The present enjoyments of agreeable flavors has 
largely remained the impelling instinct with the great 
majority, and, to a considerable and justifiable extent, 
with all mankind. 

This appropriative or co-operative instinct inevitably 
increased as other feelings developed in the directive 
minds which began progressively to control the organic 
tensions for other purposes. There was but one helpful 
kind of co-operation — that of dynamic, mutually assistive 
combinations. The free motions themselves began to be 
utilized in sight and hearing and in many kinds of impact, 
so that the development of the special senses organically, 
and the mental active sensations, also more and more 
specialized, developed with equal step. This was the be- 
ginning of the indirect modes of copartnerships. 

The eyes began to co-operate indirectly with the legs in 
running for food, and with the hands in seizing it. Thus 
the organism itself became more and more co-ordinated, 
more perfectly under the conscious control and increasingly 
utilized in the furtherance not only of remoter interests, 
but equally of the higher mental processes. The childish 
exercise of crude imagination, with little care to distin- 
guish the real from the ideal, developed the capacity for 
brain utilities, of many higher and remoter possibilities. 
With the development of discrimination, judgments 
began to be made upon a more careful basis of facts, the 
subjective was mentally separated from the objective; 
and trains of reasoning helped at once to co-ordinate the 
physical and the psychical sides of every process, and to 
extend these co-ordinations farther and farther into the 
inorganic world. The mind learned to control the physi- 
cal forces in the promotion of either physical or psychical 
results. But in the last analysis all results are psychical. 

While the organic evolution has been a physical, a 



5IO THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

structural advancement exclusively, and while it has 
everywhere advanced as one unbroken continuity of 
physical process, as all inorganic processes also maintain an 
unbroken working continuity, yet organization itself is of 
no gain to itself, and instead of ascending in endless 
spirals it would have kept the treadmill round of all inor- 
ganic process if not directed by some controlling intelli- 
gence itself advancing in experience. 

So long as instinct guides the appetite for appropriation, 
so long as a rationally directed appetite subsists upon the 
creatures on another plane of development lower than 
that of its own kind, and so long as it appropriates only 
those things which belong properly and justly to itself, it 
does only good to all other sentient beings ; it helps to 
co-ordinate and to advance all social interests. This is 
more especially true in the realm of the thoughts and the 
emotions ; and it must continue to be increasingly true in 
the immortality of living experience. The emotions will 
enlarge in sympathy. 

Thus all wrongdoing has arisen from the same root 
with all rightdoing — from the same constitutional neces- 
sity for co-operation and the instinct to extend agreeable 
experiences through adapted co-operations more extended 
in their results. The wrong was unwisely done. 

With the first dawning of an intelligence discriminating 
enough to realize that it is encroaching upon another's 
interests, begins the dawning of evil consequences, begins 
the dawning of the moral evil in the guilty consciousness. 
Heredity increases the tendencies towards crimes, injus- 
tices, and cruelties in a parallel sense in which a better 
physical inheritance increases the tendencies towards more 
equitable conduct. Regarded in this light neither our 
vices nor our virtues are to be credited entirely to our- 
selves. The environment is often worse than the heritage 
in its evil influence. 

But if all legislative and social means, directed either 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 51I 

toward reclaiming the vicious or toward the protecting 
of the innocent, would more fully recognize the nature, the 
curability, and the adapted methods of cure, human prog- 
ress would increase as the motion of a falling body in- 
creases as it approaches the more stable earth. Growth 
in crime is as much a dynamic growth as is the growth in 
intelligence and in the virtue of a co-operative benevolence. 

It seems almost weak to say that, all men are our 
brethren as children of the All Father, if we can realize 
that they all are more than bone of our bone and flesh of 
our flesh, since we all abide continuously together in one 
Infinite Love as sustentation, and since our entire devel- 
opment, material and mental, can come to us only through 
their helpful co-operation. 

Every animal becomes to us more than a brother as 
that relationship has too often been interpreted ; we are 
compelled to walk reverently upon every blade of grass 
beneath our feet, to reluctantly gather even the flowers, 
and to inflict no needless pain upon any living thing. 
Matter becomes sacred even as mind is, since it also is an 
essential, helpful, and abiding part of every finite selfhood, 
co-operative in the universal process through which every 
dependent mind receives its own personal unending de- 
velopment. Matter also is the manifestation of Intelligence 
and Beneficence — one mode of the emergence of the finite 
from the loving heart of an Infinite Generosity in our 
living behalf. 

Can there arise a question as to the ultimate good to 
everything which has received the endowment of personal 
sentience ? Whether destined or not destined to the 
high development of a rational mind, sensibility is an in- 
herent gain. Can doubt as to how and where our own 
future consciousness can be carried onward to ever as- 
cending heights cause a moment's trouble or disturbance? 
What fact of consciousness is ever realized until it is here 
in present fruition ? We may yet learn to co-operate only 



512 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

with the freest physical energies, and, even as they, be- 
come wellnigh independent of time and space. 

Gratitude, piety, wisdom, pity, magnanimity, must im- 
pel us never to rest content till the lowest, the worst, the 
cruellest, and most debased are intelligently and repen- 
tantly freed from unjust self-seeking, and impelled to make 
all possible reparation and recompense to the innocent 
sufferers. 

The great practical Creative plan will work out its own 
final justification. Myriads of personal sensibilities, infi- 
nitely more countless than the sands of the seashore, 
having entered upon their heritage of immortality, will go 
on to higher and higher realizations of its limitless possi- 
bilities. With assurances like these, catastrophies cease 
to be catastrophies. The forces of Nature, which still 
work under the law of necessity, which, though it is included 
in the vast co-operative plan, is not yet reco-ordinated 
for our especial benefit, can work us no lasting evil. If 
the Infinite who lives in all Duration is content to let all 
finite things act in accord with their own natures and op- 
portunities, then shall our peace be unduly shaken ? 

Has any been taught a worship of fear and trembling, 
let him begin to worship only in trust, in hope, in re- 
joicing, in spontaneous adoration. We are not captives 
to a mighty conqueror who requires our homage, who is 
flattered by our humility, and delighted by our meekest 
self-seeking petitions which but magnify his supreme au- 
thority. All this may have belonged to a benighted and 
congruous past. But our God is the sender of rains upon 
the evil and on the good ! He is not afar off. If we look 
within or without He is here ; He is everywhere. If we 
would worship Him we can worship only in spirit and 
in truth. 




INDEX. 



Absolute, 26-29, 30-34. 352-355. 

365, 490-497, 505 
Accumulators, 294, 297, 337 
Action and reaction, 76 ; not equal 

in modes, 51 
After images, 121, 429-431 
Ampere, molecular currents, 206 
Atom, axis, 60, 61, 100; centre of 

gravity, 100 ; definition, 32, 33, 

37 ; diagrams, 50, 68-73 ; electric 
charges on, 152 ; in electric stress, 
153 ; in magnetic stress, 206 ; 
mind-matter individual, 243, 244, 
264, 265, 268, 269 ; physical indi- 
vidual, 33,100,101, 212 ; rhythmic, 
56-76, 301 ; subject of dynamic 
universe, 427 ; transformations in, 

38 ; unit of motion, 57 ; valencies 
of, 102-104, 113 ; vibrations, 161 ; 
vibrators of, 57 ; vortex, 42, 204, 
205 

Atomic mind and soma, 275 
Attention, 346, 348, 360, 413, 420- 

424, 429, 456 
Attraction, 107, 214-216 



B 



Bacon, 238 

Bain, simultaneous succession, 286- 

288 ; two aspects of one real, 264 
Being, 26-32 ; abiding change, 27- 

33 ; abiding changelessness, 27 ; 



absolute, 26-29, 3°~34. 39. 289 ; 
conditioned unity, 38 ; infinite 
attributes, 28, 505 ; not insensate, 
492 ; relative, 26-32, 33, 34, 268 ; 
totality of, 27, 28 
Bell, telephone, 139 
Brain, co-operant of mind, 449, 450 
Bridgman, Laura, interpreting by 
impacts, 472, 473 



Causality, infinite, 490 

Cause, 275, 344, 398, 399 ; correla- 
tive, 44, 348 ; mental, 442, 443, 488 

Changing, the, 38, 39 

Classification, 4 

Cognition, 21 

Color, complementary, 121 ; objec- 
tive and subjective, I 

Conception, 239 

Conditions, dynamic and static, 451 

Consciousness, 451-478 ; directive, 
330, 331 ; divided, 456-460 ; of 
power, 479-481, 501 ; personal, 
273 ; stream of, 274, 285 ; sub- 
conscious, 451, 452 

Continuity of process, 465 

Cooke, mass and energy, 200-203 

Co-operant, 403, 404, 407 420-450 

Co-operation, 182, 183, 290 ; be- 
tween feeling and motion, 268, 
274, 279 ; interatomic, 100 ; intra- 
atomic, 99 



513 



5H 



INDEX. 



Copartnerships, dynamic, 428 

Correlated, 244-269, 341-355 ; feel- 
ing and co-operant, 401-415 ; 
groups, 267 

Correlation, 31, 49, 264-269, 329, 
348 ; a universe of, 108, 109 ; in- 
cludes all law, 108, 109 ; innate, 
485 ; permanent, 32, 370, 371 ; 
physical, 259, 303, 304 ; physical 
and psychical, 258-261, 269, 401, 
402 ; psychical, 259 ; temporary, 
■ 32, 370, 371 

Correlative, 37 

Coworkers, 363, 364 

Creation by limitation, 490, 491, 504 

Crookes, radiant matter, 216, 217 



Daniell, 220 

Darwin, correlation of physical char- 
acters, 303; theorist and naturalist, 
11, 12, 374 
Death, inorganic, 294 
Desire, 400, 447 ; nascent, 325, 368 
Development, 274, 275, 291 
Diagrams, atom in magnetic stress, 
152, in electrical stress, 153; atoms, 
50, 63-68 ; molecules, 85-87, 90, 
94, 95, 98, 99 ; vibrators electri- 
fied, 159 
Dissolution, inorganic, 295, 447 
Dolbear, 443, 444 
Dulong and Petitt, law of, 231, 232 
Duration, 27, 266, 345, 492, 512 
Dynamic correlations, 415-419 



Ego, 275-277 ; its dynamic position, 
398, 427, 428, 430 ; mind and 
matter sides, 344-346 ; nascent, 
315-332, 406 

Electricity, 145-178, 206-214 ; and 
light, 208-210 ; attraction, 169- 



173, 207 ; chemical origin, 165 ; 
closed circuit, 149, 151, 158 ; con- 
ductors, 146, 147, 170 ; currents, 

162, 166-169, 19° J dielectric, 164, 
167, 173 ; dynamic, 150, 151 ; 
electrical stress, 153-156, 164, 168; 
electrification, 150, 151, 156, 159, 

163, 178, 318; electrolysis, 164- 
167 ; electrolytic transference, 164, 
165 ; frictional origin, 145, 147 ; 
generation of, 147, 148, 150, 165 ; 
its functions, 171, 172 ; non-con- 
ductors, 149 ; polarization, 150, 
158, 175-178, 407 I positive and 
negative, 145, 146 ; repulsion, 169- 
173, 207 ; reversed action, 431 ; 
rotary motion, 174, 175 ; self-in- 
duction, 166 ; static, 147, 151 ; 
stress, 164-167 ; tensions, 145-147; 
transmission of energy, 145-151, 
165-168, 170-173 ; unlike trans- 
ference, 208, 209 

Emotions, 506 ; modes of, 286 

Energy or free motion, 33 ; conser- 
vation, 218 ; correlative, 124, 229; 
in what sense convertible, 441- 
443 ; kinetic, 233 ; radiation, 89, 
1 81-199 ; transference of, 115- 
123 ; transformation, 234-236 

Entities, 265, 271 

Environment, 315-340, 361, 362, 
402, 403 

Equilibration, 199, note 

Equilibrium, 60, 61, 299-304 ; con- 
stitutional, 211, 231; dynamic, 382; 
moving, 384 ; static, 381-384 

Ether, 108, 120, 406, 452 ; electrical, 
212, 213 ; neither attractive nor 
repulsive, 215 

Evolution, of dynamic helpers, 391- 
395 ; of experience, 493 ; of theory, 
24 

Experience, 14, 274 ; appeal to, 358— 
360 ; not organically registered, 
468 ; persistent, 363 



INDEX. 



515 



Explanation, 1-3, 5-7 ; inadequacy 
of, 45 ; its evolution, 2-4 ; objec- 
tive and subjective, 2 



Faraday, action of dielectric, 212 ; 
centres of force, 78 ; electrical law, 
207 

Feeling, 35, 347 ; an increasing total, 
397 ; conscious, 406 ; correlated 
with all gain, 251 ; directive of 
motion, 114 ; dynamic impulse, 
275, 324, 333, 334 ; equivalent of 
motion, 347, 436 ; harmonic, 285, 
286 ; indestructible, 363 ; individ- 
ual, 281, 282, 347 ; its qualities, 
269, 402 ; nascent, 318, 340 ; non- 
transferable, 342, 470 ; past, 344 ; 
present, 343 ; transmutes motion, 
328 

Finite, 354 

Fitzgerald, Bath address, 214 ; hard 
atom, 200 

Force, 36 ; not conditioned, 52 ; one 
in motion and feeling, 290 ; trans- 
ference of, 115, 133 

Foster, reflex action, 297, 298 

Free will, 352, 473~475 



G 



Gain, in what sense physical, 268, 

280, 428 ; psychical, 279, 396-398 ; 

to all participants, 370 
Galileo, 238 
Generalization, 4 
Geometry, 9 
Gravitation, 181-199 ; action of, 191; 

centreward pull, 197 ; equivalent 

of free motion, 191-193, 198 ; 

static, 188 ; theory of, 182, 196- 

198 ; weight, 188. 
Gravity, 61 ; centres of, 100, 300, 

388 



Gray, 455 

Growth, 292, 293 ; axes of, 60, 304, 

306 ; inorganic, 302, 303, 309 ; 

organic, 302, 303, 305-313 



H 



Heat, 2, 1 15-125, 220-222 ; genera- 
tion of, 123, 131 ; radiation of, 
122-125 J transference of , 117-121, 
190, 191, 383 

Helmholtz, electrical atoms, 207, 208 

Heredity, 338, 434, 510 

Hertz, identity with light, 203 ; re- 
flected electricity, 172 

Huxley, volition, 444 

Hypnotism, 459 

Hypothesis, 10-12, 124 



Ideal, 7-9, 27, 28, 290 

Imagination, 433~435 

Impact, 473 

Immortality, 270, 271 ; demonstrated, 
Preface 

Individual, the, 315, 316, 354 ; be- 
ginning, 261, 315, 316; its field 
of knowledge, 478 

Individuality, 273, 339, 485, 491 

Inertia, 228, 229 

Inferences, 242, 243, 480 

Infinite causality, 490 

Inorganic, the, partnerships, 277 ; 
process, 278 

Instinct, 341, 342 ; nascent, 325 

Integration and disintegration, 294- 
297 ; of matter, 294, 296 ; of mo- 
tion, 296, 297 

Intelligence, 342, 343, 393 



K 



Knowledge, 7, 8, 10, 19-21, 266, 
346, 350, 351, 404-409, 418, 480; 
defined, 249, 505 ; its domain, 478 



5 i6 



INDEX. 



language, 445 

Laws, within the correlative, 108, 109 

Leibnitz, 34 

Life, evolution of personal sensibility, 
265, 269, 373, 404 ; inorganic, 316, 
317 ; organic, 262, 265, 276, 290, 
291, 311, 315 

Light, 2, 1 1 5-1 2 5 ; chemical re- 
actions, 118; electro-magnetic 
theory of, 208-211 ; radiation, 
122-125 ; transference of, 117- 
121 ; wave length, 58, 59 

Lodge, electrical conduction, 170 ; 
electricity, 212, 213 



M 



Machines, 333, 444 ; correlated and 
operated by rational purpose, 489 ; 
by intelligence, 485-490 ; mind, 
directed, 322, 323 ; transference 
of power, 1 1 5-1 1 7 

Magnet, 15 1 

Magnetism, 150-155, 173-178 ; at- 
traction, 175 ; closed circuits, 154, 
155 ; field of force, 156 ; magnetic 
stress or tension, 151, 152 ; polar- 
ity, 151, 154, 175-178 ; repulsion, 

175 

Many, the, 1-5 12 ; the correlated 
units of modal being ; separate 
from the total of Being by process 
only, 485, 491, 511 

Materialists, stream of consciousness, 
274 

Matter, 31, 37, 77-114, 247, 248 ; a 
complex of motion, 36-77, 269 ; 
atom of, 138 ; change of state, 
105 ; chemical compounds, 87-99; 
crystal forming, 105, 106 ; ether, 
108, in, 118 ; gaseous, 79-81, 
106, 107 ; inertia, 228, 229 ; in- 
tegration of, 295-297 ; liquids, 
105 ; matter stuff, 234, 247 ; non- 



material, 246 ; physical com- 
pounds, 84-87 ; solids, no 

Maxwell, kinetic theory, 43 ; theory 
of light, 207-212, 219 

Memory, 421, 463-470 ; delayed, 
346 ; not organically registered, 
468 ; revived consciousness, 451 

Mendelejeff 's periodic law, 100 

Mental relationing, 350-352 

Method, 234, 264 ; inorganic, 277- 
279, 292-294 ; organic, 277-279, 
292-294 

Mind, 34, 247, 248, 473 ; conscious, 
356-386 ; directive of all process, 
322-325, 442-444, 447 ; divided 
consciousness, 457-460 ; evolution, 
387-419 ; how served by matter, 
252, 253, 345, 346, 451-477 ; im- 
mortality of, 505 ; individual, 253, 
265-267, 270, 274 ; its domain, 
344, 345, 444, 445 ; nascent, 315- 
340, 508 ; not psychical side of 
organism, 264-266 ; one aspect 
of a persistent real, n ; origin, 
291, 492 ; recipient of all gain, 
452, 453 ; relation to matter not 
unthinkable, 8 ; subconscious, 451, 
452 ; the living side of its soma, 
267, 275, 465, 466 ; when con- 
scious, 450 

Modes, 28, 29, 41 ; dynamic, 275 ; 
include motions and emotions, 275 ; 
static, 275 

Modifications, 44, 45 ; in groups, 267 

Molecule, 84-104 ; diagrams of, 85- 
87, 90, 91, 94, 95, 98, 99 ; organic, 
112, 298 

Morals, 351, 352 

Motion, 36-55, 45, 46, 314, 397 ; 
bound, 115, 167, 179 ; combined, 
281 ; community of, 283-285 ; cor- 
related, 40, 49 ; defined, 45, 56 ; 
dynamic, 190-193, 275, 394, 428 ; 
extensiveness of, 45, 200, 201 ; 
feeling side of, 283-285 ; form of, 



INDEX. 



517 



53, 61, 201 ; free, 37, 115, 116, 132, 
133, 138, 167, 179, 192, 193, 198, 
278, 318 ; heterogeneity of, 102, 
226 ; homogeneity of, 226 ; how 
convertible, 273, 281, 285 ; how 
co-operative, 281, 473; individual, 
282 ; integration of, 295-297 ; in 
time and space, 38 ; intra-atomic, 

54, 55, 101, 281, 282 ; laws of, 
40-42 ; mass, 220 ; modifications 
of, 51, 101, 286 ; molar, 32, 113, 
321, 322 ; organic, 295 ; past, 
344 ; perpetual 323 ; present, 341 ; 
primary, 49 ; rest, 59, 60 ; rhyth- 
mic, 40, 51, 218-220 ; secondary, 
46 ; static, 70, 190 ; tensions, 44, 
69-72, 74, 75-81, 83, no ; trans- 
ference of, 157, 179-182 ; transla- 
tion, 43, 46, 58, 225, 319, 495 ; 
units of, 41, 50, 102 ; visible, 39, 
74 ; voluntary, 278 

Motives, 352, 473-476 
Myths, nature of, 14, 15 



N 



Nascent beings, 322, 333, 363-365 ; 

immortal, 363, 364 
Natural selection, 323, 326, 373, 374, 

5°3> 504 ; mind directed, 322, 323 
Necessity, 476 ; law of 496-498 
Nerves, 429, 430 
Nervous system, 336, 400, 430 
Newton, 20; laws of, 42, 43, 238 
Nodes, 56, 60, 301-304, 388-390, 

395 ; position of dynamic recipient, 

452, 453 
Nutrition, 306, 307 
Nutritive system, 335, 336 



One, the, 1-5 12 ; the total of Being ; 
infinite and absolute Power, Life, 
and Mind, 504, 505 



Organic, centre of gravity, 395 ; life, 
276 ; nodes, 388-390 ; processes, 
277-279, 329, 330 ; rhythm, 366, 
367 

Organism stores available energy, 
348, 349 

Organization, co-operant of mind, 
356-386 ; correlation of characters, 
303> 3°4 > cumulative, 279 ; effi- 
ciency, 296-299 ; energy transfer, 
336, 406 ; growth, 293-295, 302- 
3*3. 33° > i n a g e an( i feebleness, 
341 ; inherent trend of, 471, 472 ; 
life of, 279 ; natural selection, 323 ; 
nodes, 301-305 ; nutritive system, 
335 ; physical side, 279, 292-313, 
326 ; reflex action, 333 ; theory of, 
279» 366, 367, 447 ; two aspects, 
329 

Organizers, the, 363-368 

Outlook, 7, 8, 440 



Paley, argument from design, 494 

Paradox, 226 

Perception, 237, 426, 481 

Phenomena, objective and subjective, 
20, 503 ; real, but inadequate, 10, 
17-19 

Philosophy, 5, n-13, 24, 25 

Physical non-gain, 280, 396-398 

Physics, domain of, 442-444 

Point of view, 14 

Power, 248 ; available, 270, 278, 
279 ; immanent, 37, 38, 247 ; liv- 
ing, 267 ; not conditioned, 52, 479, 
492 ; not created by limitations, 
492; our cognizance of, 478-481, 
504 ; persisting, 36 ; transference 
of, 1 1 5-1 33 ; use of, 491 ; working 
under conditions, 481-485, 492 

Presentation, 21 

Process, correlative, 2 to, 211 ; con- 
tinuity of, 465 ; mind, directive of, 
447 ; unit of, 253 



5i8 



INDEX. 



Property, 285 

Psychical gain, 280, 396-398 



Quality, 266, 333 
Quantity, 266, 333 

R 

Radiation, 181-199; 216, 217 ; law 

of, 185, 186, 191 
Real, the, 8, 9, 27, 28, 247 
Realist, 266 

Recognition, grades of, 455 
Reincarnations, 500 
Relation, 5-8, 10, 38 ; dynamic, 437 ; 

static, 437 
Relative, the, 28, 29 
Remembering, 275 
Representation, 21, 29, 429, 432 
Repulsion, 107, 214-216 
Respiration, 328 
Retributions, positive and negative, 

507, 508 
Rhythm, 223-226, 367 ; modified, 

51 ; unmodified, 316 
Roscoe, structure of particles, 138 



Science, 5, 11-13, 238 ; of self-con- 
trol, 475 

Self-consciousness not continuous, 
428 

Self, selfhood, 493 

Sensation, 346, 350 ; estimates dis- 
tance, 432 ; more prolonged than 
the stimulus, 430, 431 ; nascent, 
327, 332, 333 

Senses, differently stimulated, 460- 
461 ; disparate, 360, 361, 426 ; 
special, 327, 338, 432 

Sensibility, 246, 269, 343 ; conti- 
nuity of, 465 ; co-operative, 281, 
484 ; is living power, 484 



Sentience, 318, 319, 351 

Soul, 271, 275, 280 

Sound, 125-144 ; music, 134, 139- 
143 ; noise, 143 ; origin of, 125- 
I2 7, 133-143 ; transference of, 
126-136 

Space, 230, 231, 249 

Spencer, environment, 402, 445 ; 
feeling, 35 ; impressions, 6 ; in- 
tegration, 294-297 ; rhythm of 
motion, 223-226 

Stress, 43, 47, 82, 112; electrical, 
164, 166 ; inhibitary, 465 ; mag- 
netic, 206 

Strongest motive, 352 

Subject and object, 420, 426, 427 ; 
in opposition, 426, 427 ; in work- 
ing correlation, 427, 406-418 ; 
physically connected, 425 

Sutherland, repulsion a mode of 
attraction, 214, 215 



Tait, energy conservation, and work, 
218, 321; sound of telephone, 139; 
waste-heap, 220 

Tanner, 377 

Tension, static matter or stress, 44, 
225 

The Many, 1-512 ; the correlated 
units of modal being ; separate 
from the total of ! Being by process 
only, 485, 491, 511 

The One, 1-5 12 ; the total of Being ; 
infinite and absolute Power, Life, 
and Mind, 493, 504, 505 

Theory, correlated, 341-355 ; its 
evolution, 2-4 

Thinkable, the, 8 

Thinking defined, 436 ; correlate of 
material process, 415 

Thomson, Sir W., repulsion a mode 
of attraction, 214, 215 ; vortex- 
atom, 43, 203-205 



INDEX. 



519 



Thomson, J. J., vortex molecules, 

204, 205 
Thought, 348-351 ; transference of, 

471 
Time, 27, 249, 266, 273 
Tyndall, correlation of mind and 

matter unthinkable, 260-263 



U 



Ultimate units, 500 ; correlatives, 47 

Unchanging, the, 38, 39, 481 ; im- 
manent in the changing, 481 

Unconscious cerebration, 462 

Unit, the ultimate, 244, 245 ; corre- 
lation created, 315, 316 

Unity of Nature, 3, 46, 232 

Unknowable, 13, 14 

Use, to the inorganic, 292 ; to the 
organic, 292 



Vibrations, 49, 61, 219, 234, 235 ; 
atomic, 49 ; direct, 59, 61, 175 ; 
mass, 219 ; transverse, 59, 61, 



1- 



* JO 

Vibrators, 57 ; combining, 79 
101 ; surface, 75, 112, 227 

Volition, 352, 473-476 

Vortex, ring atom, 42, 204, 205 ; 
sponge, 206 



W 



Ward, mind from organization, 287- 

289 
Will, 352, 473-475 
Work, 218, 220 
Working separateness, 491 












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